Centered and combat-ready, Yves had observed Black Cherry's descent with a calm, analytical appreciation for fine form. Black Cherry executed her leap with cliff-diver perfection. Wings fanned out, sailing into the air. Her body curled downward the moment her jump achieved apex. Fists thrust forward. Wings snapped inward, slapping together at supersonic speed. Black Cherry rode the thunderclap down.
She hammered into the hood, a pile-driving pillar, a fallen angel sculpted from red clay and blackest basalt. The hood and engine block crumpled. The Jeep rebounded into the air, pivoting on the immobile fulcrum Black Cherry had become. Yves saw her sneer, her page boy hair cut flying wild, her abyssal gaze locked on Dee's face. Her voice was triumphant, primal. Demoniac.
"Master!"
Dee turned away from her, his expression stony and stolid even as the Jeep's rear wheels rose higher than the front. He reached behind and above his head, bracing himself against the Jeep's roll-bar. The trunk of the Jeep soared higher. Black Cherry's impact stapled the hood to the road. Dee kicked his left foot into the driver's side foot well. The vehicle's chassis squealed as it fought against the opposing forces trying to tear it in half.
Yves struggled for focus amidst madness. Dee's not bracing his body against the Jeep's roll-cage. Yves' seat belt bit into his tender shoulder. Dee's trying to brace the roll-cage against his body. Yves closed his eyes.
The passenger compartment buckled but resisted caving inward and crushing Yves to death. Yves turned to stare at his friend. Holy shit. The cords in Dee's neck flexed. His arms strained as he battled torque, stress, and metal fatigue. It's really true. Yves found himself very surprised to be alive.
Dee's a fucking superhero.
Black Cherry was forced backward as the Jeep hurtled upright. The vehicle's shadow overtook her. Her triumphal sneer faltered. Two tons of American truck know-how bore down upon her. Yves heard Raspberry's battle cry over the ruckus of tortured metal, plastic, and glass. "Say 'Splat,' bitch!"
Black Cherry set her jaw and swung her legs down, puncturing the pavement with her Mary Jane clogs. Her wings shot forward, around, and then behind the Jeep. Crimson claws pierced the undercarriage. Yves heard Ursula yelp and stamp. Black Cherry's sneer returned with a lazy roll of her head. Tension gathered within her gel.
Dee spoke. His voice bypassed Yves' ears still half-stoppered with beeswax. His words came from outside time and transcended other sound, as if the world paused, eager to listen. They resounded through bone, sang in the blood, rang clear as a tower bell in the brain. "Raz, to Yves. Now."
Two lavender arms shot in through the open driver's window in uncoiling springs. Cool fingers entwined behind Yves' neck. The bendy-straw arms cinched up slack and Raspberry's angelic face zoomed into view until her button nose dimpled his cheek. Her eyes searched his as she muttered a lightning quick, "Awfuckit," and kissed him hard and square on the lips.
His mouth filled with the flavors of summer as more and more of Raspberry's jellied substance poured through the window and pressed its supple weight against him. Yves had never been kissed in bullet time before. His heightened awareness let the kiss linger even though it lasted no more than a second or two. He could not fully process the experience, as his inner ear reported he was now suspended upside down.
The Jeep slung high over Black Cherry's head. Her arms and wings took on the full weight of the Jeep and all its occupants. She crowed in triumph.
I'll have to try this again, Yves vowed to himself as Raspberry broke the awkward kiss. If only the person kissing me back had a dick, I'm sure I could get it right. Outside, Black Cherry followed through, accelerating her pitch. If only I could survive the next few sec—
Black Cherry hurled the Jeep with all her strength. The vehicle flipped end-over-end once, then twice, before colliding with a ferroconcrete pylon. The blacktop below fissured. Cement chips and dust showered from the highway above. The Jeep folded up, chevron-shaped, and tumbled to the ground.
"Splat," said she.
The Jeep hit the pavement passenger-side down. The safety glass windshield fractured milky-white on impact. Cracks and torn seams in the canvas top bubbled and wept golden champagne froth. The carriage bled oil, radiator and hydraulic fluid. Dust settled in the quiet.
The driver's side door bulged outward then burst away in lavender geyser. The crest of the eruption resolved into the upper body of Raspberry herself, a bust carved from the richest amethyst. More gel peeled away to reveal Yves, slack, motionless, and cradled in Raspberry's willowy embrace. Yves groaned.
Raspberry startled at the sound. Yves rolled his head and winced. Raspberry's shoulders sagged and she hugged Yves close. "Shh. I gotcha, babe." Her limpid gaze fell upon Black Cherry. Raspberry purpled with rage. She hissed through gritted teeth. "I am gunna rip off your head and shit down your neck you jam-ragged, clit-clot cunt."
The dainty batwings poking out from behind Black Cherry's ears flared. "I'll kill you where you stand." The scarlet girl froze in mid-snarl, blinking her confusion. "As soon as I figure out what you just said."
The Jeep's windshield exploded. Nuggets of safety glass flew like birdshot, ricocheted off Black Cherry's creamy red, rubbery hide, and clattered against the yellow SUV in the shadows behind her. Dee withdrew his fists. "Raz," he said, "enough banter. Get Yves out of here."
Raspberry's bare hips and legs coalesced and she pivoted to jump from the Jeep. Black Cherry sidled and stretched a wing wide to block her path. "That's my playmate," she said, jerking a wing claw at Yves. "Master gave him to me and I only got to play with him once."
Dee elbowed out of the Jeep and rose to his feet, uncut and unbruised. "Let her go, Cherry."
Black Cherry golf-clapped her hands. "Oh, Master: name me." She giggled and grabbed her knees. "Name me like you named your stupid green whore. Name me and I will become she who eats worlds for you."
Something heavy clonked and settled inside the Jeep. Black Cherry craned her neck to see but Dee hustled in between, his back to the vehicle. "Let them all go, Cherry, and I will stay." He swung one arm behind his back, hand opening and closing in a pantomime yap yap yap.
Black Cherry clucked and dismissed the notion with a pshaw flick of the wrist. "You don't mean that, Master. You're going to stay anyway. Besides, I don't think Raspberry wants to leave. I had her made for you, you know." Dee pointed to the left with the hand hidden behind his back. "Why haven't you fucked her yet? I would smell her on you if you had. She wants you to fuck her, Master." She tipped her head, leading with her nose, breathing deep and nibbling her bottom lip. "She wants you so badly I can taste it from here." Dee pointed left again, looped his index finger around to the right before bringing his hand down flat. "But she can't handle it like I can, Master. She's so horny she can't understand you want her to feint to the left so you can flank me on the right while I'm monologing."
"Oh," drawled Raspberry behind him. "Now I get it."
Dee heard a fizzy susurrus. Sunny slush frothed down the Jeep's sideways roof and heaped onto the pavement. Raspberry's speedy recovery matched her quick temper, but Dee knew CeeCee and Eurydice needed much more time to sort themselves out after such a rough jolt. He opted to stall, hoping to Hell that Ursula and Nyx were unhurt. "X-ray vision?"
Head-wings rolled into cute megaphones around Black Cherry's ears. "Sonar." She winked. "Echolocation off the metal behind you, of course, because you're so impenetrable, Master." Her head-wings unfurled only a fraction before Dee spoke in his newfound voice.
"Let them go, Cherry."
Black Cherry gaped. Head-wings twitched and wilted with melt. Sanguinary brandy brimmed her lips and slicked her sex as the pylons supporting the overhead arch of the highway amplified and took up her name. Cherry—Cherry—Cherry. She rocked with each echo, dropping to one knee, then the other, and then to all fours.
The echoes played out a long, low, bubbling roar, leonine and almost subsonic: Cherrrry. Black Cherry keened in reply, arms trembling, wings pearling with fat drops of ruby nectar. "Yes, Master, yes. Go." The underpass still purred with the final vestiges of Dee's echoed voice—rrr…rrry—and Black Cherry fell back on her haunches. Head bowed, she waved Raspberry away. "Go. Go!"
Raspberry dismounted from the Jeep, her elastic legs protracting down onto the road before returning to their usual sumptuous, classical perfection. Yves, face pinched in pain, rode the gentle descent in her arms. Raspberry eased by Black Cherry, twittering and pawing at the ground. "Go, go," the scarlet girl whimpered. Dee's echo died. Black Cherry's hands curled into fists. "No."
Dee charged, seized a bleeding wing. He planted his feet and started a vicious twist. Black Cherry reared back and tore the captured wing off her shoulder with her own hands. The wing dissolved in a russet flood. The momentum of his planned attack knocked Dee off his feet. "Run, Raz!"
Black Cherry howled, "I told you I could handle it, Master!" She bitch-slapped the fleeing Raspberry across the back with the flat of her remaining wing.
Raspberry exploded into purple haze. Yves sailed, ragged-doll limbed, through the air. The sound was consonant with the recording of smashing glass played backward and too fast and a thousand harp strings rubbed with steel nails. Raspberry snapped into solidity parallel and inches below Yves. She threw her arms and legs around him an instant before they both hit the pavement.
Dee kipped up but Black Cherry clipped him on the chin with an uppercut on her backswing and knocked him flat on his back. "I should have known my minions would never be enough for you. Not like I am." Behind her, Raspberry and Yves streaked over the blacktop, trailing a greased, lavender wake. "I'm glad I stopped with the latex gimp. Where is she, anyway? Hiding isn't her style at all. Ah, well, she'll show up just in the nick of time, I suppose."
Dee sat up, rattling his head, his jaw pins-and-needles numb.
Black Cherry sighed. "Where was I? Oh, monologing, yes." She splayed her hands, crimson fluid rushing up her legs and humping her back with a burgeoning wing. Her once-nectarous surface smoothed into a polished rind of creamy carmine. "So there I was, with boxes and boxes of Jell-O gelatin, just oodles of raw collagen powder." Dee staggered to his feet. "I had to do something with it, but I'm not really the baking type." Dee charged, arms out, palms flat. He struck her in the abdomen, arms working in a peculiar rhythm. Nothing happened.
Black Cherry cleared her throat. Dee stared down at his hands, one on her tummy, the other sandwiched between her breasts. The geek and the scarlet girl looked each other in the eye.
"So I ate it all," Black Cherry smirked, and punched Dee in the gut with the force of a wrecking ball.
The asphalt dimpled into two shallow potholes beneath Black Cherry's feet when her underhand swing caught Dee's stomach right below the ribs. The pin-and-needles sensation erupted across his body, over his skin and through meat and fiber. A seismograph slung down from his butt would have recorded a 6.7 Richter scale Dee-quake with its epicenter beneath the intruding crimson fist. Dee stood motionless, eyes watering, for a long and breathless moment.
The laws of physics caught up with his nanomek-enhanced physique and launched Dee into the air, doubled over, a superman in sweatpants flying in reverse. His trajectory described a grand ellipse until he crashed, still ass-backwards, into a high corner where a recessed pylon met the overhead highway above the yellow SUV. The entire structure shivered, cement blocks scraping together, louder than firecrackers. The steel rebar enforcing the integrity of the overpass fatigued but held.
Dee fell. He belly-flopped onto the roof of the yellow SUV. The vehicle's rear and side windows blew out as the impact bent the roof at jaunty angle. Three figures, already crouched and hidden between the SUV and the pylon, dropped to their knees and escaped the spray of glass. Numbness blossomed into dull headache and honest-to-goodness, throbbing pain. He rolled his head to the side.
The three figures stood swaddled in shadow. Heads and arms hung low, faces covered in bedraggled, damp and filthy hair, reminding Dee of undead wet girls from Japanese horror movies. Dee thought he heard a muffled buzzing noise. He managed to mumble, "Ow, quit it," before all the lights went out.
Raspberry and Yves slid to a slippery halt. Raspberry rolled over and laid Yves out on his back. She fought off weakness, tried to be tender. Raspberry, pale and wan, knelt over Yves' inert body. The long trail of purple jelly collected into oozy polliwogs and wiggled upstream toward her. She bent close to Yves and nestled her head against his chest, eyes squeezed shut in hope. She felt a strong heartbeat, a shuddery breath. Relief flooded through her and the polliwogs raced to feed her growing, rising, darkening, furious form.
Black Cherry contemplated her fist, mashed flatter than a ball of clay thrown against a brick wall, less than a dozen feet away from where Raspberry, radiant with rage, made her stand. The intense silence made the scarlet girl turn and look on with mild interest. Raspberry said, "Burn."
She spat acid. A sizzling jet of molten violet struck Black Cherry in the face. The scarlet girl screeched and reeled, clawing at her face with her good hand. Raspberry spat again but overshot as Black Cherry fell kicking to the ground. The ejecta struck a concrete pylon.
"Raz," Yves called to her over the Black Cherry's now burbling screams. "Raz."
Raspberry sat on her knees next to him, took his hand in hers. "Yeah?"
Yves watched the purple sputum eat a pizza-sized hole in the pylon's concrete, revealing ribs of blackened steel rebar. "What was that?" His voice was very faint.
"My acid tongue. CeeCee calls me a real spitfire. I think it's one of her stupid double tundra thingies." She glanced up. A wide shape, a massive curvy mound of peach-orange ice cream, drew itself together by the overturned Jeep. Raspberry smiled. "You can ask the fat ass yourself in a minute."
Yves shut his eyes. "I didn't know you could do that."
"There's a lot you don't know about me." She felt so tired.
Yves reopened his eyes and Raspberry did her best to smile again. "You wouldn't happen to be a goo guy in drag, would you?" Yves asked.
The burbling screams tapered off into wet hissing.
Raspberry shrugged. "Nah."
Yves sighed, "Ah, well." He paused. Raspberry guessed he was waiting for a comeback. She did not feel like giving one. Yves frowned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Raspberry stood, mimed dusting off her knees. "Hawking a loogie takes a shitload of nanomek, that's all." She thrust her hands on her hips. "And I've already spent a couple o' fuckloads saving your pansy ass. Twice. I…" She blinked, gazing off into the middle-distance. "I…" She looked down.
Twelve inches of curved, crimson wing-claw protruded from between her breasts. The claw curled lazily downward, dripping purple ichor, its needle-sharp tip pricking her tummy, poised to rip.
"Oh," Raspberry said.
Dee drifted in squishy darkness. Wait a minute, he thought, I'm not unconscious. His head bopped to a jerking rhythm. Someone's sitting on my face.
Exhaustion, fear, and horror all demanded Yves cringe, look away, succumb to shock. He refused. "Raz." He would not abandon Raspberry. "Raz, look at me." She met his gaze. "Breathe. Don't look away. Eight forces sustain creation," he told her, calm and sure, as the red claw tore through her. "Breathe." Purple nectar spurted and stung his face and neck but Yves held Raspberry captive with his unblinking, sky-blue scrutiny. "Movement and stillness. Breathe." Yves sat up as Raspberry slumped toward him. He bobbed his head birdlike to keep their eyes locked. "Extension and contraction." Yves doffed his overshirt. Raspberry sank to her knees. "Breathe. Unification and division."
Raspberry swooned, surface tension failing. Her features ran as slowly melting wax. Yves swooped his overshirt about her, gathered her into his lap, securing the shirt with a quick knot of the sleeves. Tie-dye splotches bloomed over the white shirt but Raspberry held together. "Solidity and fluidity," Yves smiled down at her.
Raspberry pressed a cooling, gluey palm against his cheek. Her leer was a vague sickle-shape in her syrupy face. "You are shit fucking hot. We're so lucky Dee chose you." Yves wanted to ask the obvious question but saved it for later.
Black Cherry loomed, wings held close, claws clicking above her head. Curlicues of crimson vapor wafted from her mouth and brow. "Let her go," she protested in the tones of a peeved toddler. "You're mine. She doesn't get to play with you unless I say so. She hurt me and I am going to kill her. You're my playmate."
"Is he now?" CeeCee's golden bulk boiled up behind Black Cherry. "Well, Raz is mine, and I say you need to take a few Midol and mellow out."
Black Cherry spun, wings whickering. CeeCee stood her ground. Crimson wing claws stabbed deep into the moiling gel-flesh below her breasts. Buttery pudding suppurated around the sunken claws, bleeding in little rills that scrawled over the veins in Black Cherry's webbed wings. Black Cherry smirked, hooked her wing claws deep within CeeCee's core, and tugged to rend the amber woman in two.
CeeCee neither split nor budged. Black Cherry's Mary Janes scuffed over the pavement as the tugging motion of her wings dragged her a few feet closer to the amber woman's viscid, endlessly flowing curves. The little rills of cheesecake pudding rolling over her red wings surged into rivulets. Black Cherry frowned, jerked one shoulder backward—and tripped a step forward. The golden rivulets wove themselves into a thickening net across Black Cherry's wings. Tendrils crept across her back. The scarlet girl growled, gnashed her teeth, hauled with her other shoulder, and lurched sideways into CeeCee's abounding flesh.
Soft, amber cleavage swallowed Black Cherry's neck. CeeCee chuckled, a rich, glutinous sound. She wrapped her arms around the bewildered scarlet girl, kneaded Black Cherry's devil-red little rump and mushed their mons together. Black Cherry whimpered and surrendered to the urge to grind. Her wings, torso, and legs were quickly coated in yellow cake batter.
"Honey," CeeCee clucked. Black Cherry's trembling chin vanished in the cloying avalanche of golden gel-flesh. "I knew you were cumming." CeeCee's maw yawned wide. "So I baked you a cake," she finished, and started devouring Black Cherry in earnest.
Raspberry, bug-eyed and enraptured by the sloppy spectacle, squirmed in Yves' lap. "Jesus fuck. Look-it. Look-it! Would ya look-it?"
Yves shook his head, eye shut tight. "I ain't look-it-ting."
Addled and clobbered, Dee spent a few beats refocusing his senses. He had not plunged into comatose darkness. Some girl wearing skintight black jeans had scrabbled onto the bent roof of the yellow SUV, leapt froglike astraddle his face, and sat on his forehead, knees squeezed against his ribs. She rode the bridge of his nose like a berserk bicyclist slogging out the last few miles of Le Tour de France. Her denim seat sopped and reeked of sweat and sex and a hint of oven-fresh chocolate chip cookies. After all he had been through, Dee decided, he would never again enjoy a single innocent thought or taste of dessert. Maybe I'll be able to eat a brussel sprout without thinking of wild, raunchy sex, but that's about it.
The mystery girl sitting on his head buried her face in his crotch and mouthed his cock through his sweatpants and underwear. Her breath basted the cotton-nylon blends cupping his shaft and balls in sweltering warmth. His dick stiffened in reflex and the mystery girl assaulted him with a fully clothed fellatio-cunnilingus combo attack. Another day, Dee thought, grabbing handfuls of the ass bouncing against his forehead, another ambush sixty-nine session. He pried her ass away from his face. The jeans were so tight her cheeks felt rock solid. Sunlight spilled across the sodden camel-toe trying to stomp his nose flat. I bet this never happens to Batman.
A fountain of flaxen hair blotted out the sun. A second girl—Dee recognized her, the blonde E-Z sorority sister who hit on him last night and then joined this morning's creepy carwash—her eyes blank of all expression except hunger, forced the mystery girl's ass high and rammed her tongue down Dee's throat. Dee craned his neck and took stock of his situation.
The blonde tickled his tonsils like an alien facehugger. She stood on the hood of the SUV. Her white tee-shirt gaped open to reveal the top swells of big, wobbling breasts. Her wide, wine-dark areola and fat nipples still stuck to the translucent, wet material of her tee. Wow, Ursula was right on about those.
"Honey," Dee heard CeeCee say, her voice deep and oddly amplified, "I knew you were cumming so I baked you a cake." He tipped his head.
CeeCee had enveloped Black Cherry almost head-to-toe and was suckling on the scarlet girl as she would slurp down a thick chocolate cherry milkshake. My God. Red wings dissolved and siphoned off in swirls into CeeCee's gullet. I should have known.
["…What can I say, honey, we go together well…"]
Great spirals of black and crimson burst from Black Cherry's slowly deliquescing body and funneled into CeeCee, her gel-flesh banded and stormy with a riot of color. Chocolate and cherries go great with cheesecake. CeeCee is going to kick Black Cherry's ass.
The mystery girl whined and strained against the blonde's arms, trying to smack her ass back down atop Dee's face. Dee propped his head up, the blonde still slopping her lips over his. His crotch had sprouted a bobbing carrot-top; the mystery girl turned out to be the redhead E-Z from earlier. Her fingers fumbled over Dee's sweats. She yanked the elastic waist but, like proverbial monkey with his clenched fist stuck in the cookie jar, she would not stop munching on Dee's cock through his clothes and stalemated herself.
A brunette, the third E-Z from last night, hopped and kicked her way up the hatchback, clawing onto the roof. It's about to get pretty crowded up here. He twisted side to side. We're a good eight feet off the ground, glass everywhere, nowhere to maneuver. CeeCee's bought me some time. How do I get them off me without hurting them?
The blonde sucked his face with bottomless abandon. He tried his newfound voice anyway: "Ge' mmf."
A collective shudder passed through the two girls ravaging him. Their ardor and enthusiasm doubled. The left-out brunette wailed and bounded up between his legs. Dee's dispassion toward their efforts became difficult to maintain and his dick fully engorged. Yeah, that worked well. What to do? I can't hurt them, even by accident. They're innocent.
["…innocent of this matter, I mean…"]
The brunette pushed the redhead away. The redhead's mouth popped off Dee's cock with an angry huff. Her hands, as if driven by some other willpower, still tugged mechanically on his pants, and she finally managed to bare his manhood. The redhead wolfed down the head of Dee's dick, angled her neck, dove for a deep throat—and thwacked her forehead against the brunette, who was already slurping up his shaft and pawing at his balls.
Just great. It grew difficult to distract himself from the all the tongues and teeth, the flashes of flesh, the funk of savaged sex, and especially the two pairs of lips and four hands mindlessly muscling for rank and territory on his package. Zombie cockfight.
Yves risked a peek over Raspberry's head. CeeCee dined, poised and regal, on Black Cherry's dwindling gel. Black Cherry swooned but could not escape the amber woman's engulfing embrace. CeeCee pressed forward, swelling as she drew in more and more crimson gel-flesh, a plus-sized vampire gowned in a muumuu of many colors. Black Cherry evanesced in spewing plumes, shuddering orgiastic with every rupture from her core. CeeCee's gourmandizing. His gorge rose at the thought.
["…my compliments to the chef, Yves. That was choice…"]
He turned aside. His silver Jeep squatted sideways a few yards away. The little truck looked like someone pulled a Thelma-and-Louise and drove it off a cliff. Yves squinted. Abstract green shapes, indistinct emerald cones and jade crescents, tumbled and bumped against the plastic rear window. He saw no sign of Nyx or Ursula.
"Hey, Dee," he called, twisting. Raspberry settled in his lap. "Listen, Dee, Eurydice is having trouble putting herself back to…whatthefuck?"
The yellow SUV sat in shadow under the overpass. Dee sprawled on its skewed roof, buried under three mindfucked co-eds. A redhead tried to sixty-nine him to death. She was thwarted by a busty blonde, standing on the SUV's hood and pushing the redhead's ass up with both hands while giving Dee a suffocating tongue-bath. A brunette curled around Dee's legs and battled the redhead over who could gobble Dee's cock the deepest and longest before coming up for air.
So that's public fuckability, Yves thought. "Dee, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" The world can't really work this way, can it?
Dee edged an arm out from under the redhead's thighs. He nudged the blonde's chin away from his face, uprooting her from his mouth. The blonde slavered, puckering like a fish out of water. Dee spread his fingers to hold her at bay and she nursed wetly on his thumb. "Trying not to ejaculate. Failing. Got any ideas?"
"Stop fucking and start fighting. Knock their heads together or something." Yves said. Dee's expression curdled. "What? Why not? Oh, Christ, is this some 'great power, great responsibility,' comic book morality crap? Or just Dark Age chauvinism?"
"It's Silver Age." The chill in Dee's voice dropped below freezing. "Got any other ideas?"
Yves thought for a second, then turned to the goo girl warming his lap. "Raz, you said something before. About Nyx saving us from being buried in zombie pussy, remember?" Raspberry nodded, eyes glued on CeeCee. "What happens to one of Black Cherry's skank-bots when she's distracted?"
"Automatic pilot," Raspberry answered, sounding robotic herself.
"Dee," Yves said. "They're on automatic pilot, whatever that means. Can you use that?"
The two girls feasting on Dee's dick settled into a relentless, counterpoint rhythm. The brunette humped his leg. The redhead strained to smother Dee with her ass again, but the blonde's grip on the redhead's ass held and kept it aloft. The blonde crooned and deep throated Dee's thumb.
Dee twitched, sweating. "Got…one…chance." He raised his free arm.
"You're loving this," Yves chided.
Dee wrapped his free hand around one of the blonde's wrists and slid it toward the center of the redhead's ass. The blonde did not protest or stop slobbering on Dee's other thumb. Her fingers slid into the redhead's ass-crack. Dee let go. The blonde stared blankly down at him but her fingers fondled the redhead's ass.
Dee muttered, "Bingo," and moved the blonde's other hand over the camel toe formed by the redhead's tight jeans' seam pressing into her vulva. The blonde absent-mindedly pressed two slender fingers against the seam, tracing little circles. The redhead stopped straining and started bucking her hips from side to side. She groaned, mouth full of cock.
"You've got to be kidding me," Yves said, watching Dee unbuckle the redhead's belt. "This is your plan?" Dee pulled down on the redhead's zipper. "I said they were on automatic pilot, not bi-curious." Dee unzipped the redhead's fly not halfway before the blonde grabbed the belt and hauled the redhead's pants down.
"Whoa," Yves said. The redhead wore no panties. Her bare ass bobbled free, shiny and wet with sweat and sex. "Wow, um…" The blonde squirmed her thumb over the clitoral hood hidden in a trimmed tuft of fiery red hair and sank two fingers third-knuckle deep between swollen labia. "That's, uh…"
Dee hoisted his suckled thumb upward. The blonde followed, keeping her mouth locked around his flesh, until the top of her head bumped against the redhead's butt. She spat out Dee's thumb like it were old gum, clawed the redhead's thighs and latched her lips on the redhead's pussy.
Yves gave up. Maybe the world doesn’t work this way for everybody, but it sure as shit does for Dee. "Good plan, Dee."
The blonde went tongue-spelunking. The redhead pulled herself off his cock to howl her pleasure. Dee propped himself up, lightning fast. He plucked the brunette's face away from his balls and very gently pressed her forehead against the redhead's. The two girls gazed deep into each other's eyes for a moment, then soul-kissed with a manic ferocity, arms entwining in a desperate clinch.
"And that…" Dee said, shaking his leg out from under the brunette. She took the opportunity to scoot close to the redhead and peel off her tee-shirt. Dee slipped off the roof feet-first, doing up his pants in the process. "…is how Deiter fucking Detwiler knocks heads," he finished as he touched down on the pavement, adjusting the crotch of his sweatpants in a meager attempt at modesty.
The blonde scrambled onto the roof of the yellow SUV, shucking her shirt. Discarded skank-wear pattered down around the vehicle.
Dee jogged over to CeeCee. The amber woman swallowed down the last of Black Cherry, noshing on a literal piece of ass like slice of watermelon. "CeeCee," Dee said, beaming, "you're amazing. How long can…" His face fell. "CeeCee?"
CeeCee swayed. Her gel-flesh churned with licks of red and black brume. "Not long, honey," she said. She glanced up, not at Dee, but at Raspberry, and added, "Master."
Raspberry spoke, "Back in the kitchen, you said you would never eat Black Cherry, only me." Her face was a child's and Yves thought she might cry. "Why not?" She sounded so plaintive Yves could not resist hugging her to him. "Why now?"
CeeCee's weary smile was stained the color of blood oranges and cinnamon. "Because it costs too much nanomek," she answered. Her canary-yellow eyes misted over. "And I knew I'd have to do it to save your fool life someday." Her eyes dimmed into a dull, abyssal black. When she spoke again, her voice as not entirely her own. "And I think I can only do it once."
"Hold out as long as you can, CeeCee" Dee said, "and we'll stick to the original plan." CeeCee bobbed her head and Dee turned. "Yves. You mobile?"
Yves nodded, making the world spin. He fought to stay upright and nodded until the vertigo went away.
"Alright," Dee said, "you get Raz and your own ass the Hell out of here." He turned to CeeCee. The amber woman's face scrunched and fists trembled. Her gel-flesh reddened. "I'll take care of the rest," he added.
"Fuck you," Raspberry spat, "I am not leaving CeeCee." Her brow furrowed. "What original plan?"
Yves consoled her as Dee hustled over to the Jeep. "We're just going a little bit back down the road where we came, that's all. Can you walk?"
Dee stuck his head in the Jeep's skyward-pointing, driver-side window. Yves heard several muffled voices in a murmur of quick conversation. "Raz," Yves said, giving her the gentlest of shakes, "can you walk?"
She pulled her shoulders out of his arms. "How the fuck should I know, motherfucker? I've never been this motherfucking low on fucking nanomek before. Besides, if I walk..." Her anger dissolved into tears. "If I walk away from CeeCee right now, like this, I'd die, I'd just die. Yves, what are we going to do?"
"Stick to the original plan," Yves told her before calling out to Dee, "We good?"
Dee pulled his head out of the Jeep's window. Lime green frosting ringed his mouth. A black lip-print of a chaste kiss adorned his forehead like some ceremonial third eye. "We're good." He shuffled to the rear of the Jeep, testing handholds.
Raspberry sniffled. "What original plan?"
Dee found a handhold and pushed. The Jeep scrapped forward. Dee blinked and started, an expression Yves readily identified as Dee's Holy-shit-that-was-easy face. Yves glanced at CeeCee. Two big, ludicrous lumps of amber gelatin gathered on her, like sideways Bactrian camel humps. Her eyes were jammed shut, but he knew that a meliae's senses did not always correspond to anatomy. He decided to risk it.
Yves pointed left, then circled his finger around to the right, and brought his palm down flat.
"I thought I screwed that up," Raspberry said. The Jeep inched nearer to the mouth of the overpass, trailing flecks of metal, glass, and silver paint.
"Black Cherry doesn't know Dee like I do, no matter what the psycho-bitch thinks," Yves told her. "Watch."
Yves pointed left. Raspberry followed his finger, saw the little copse of trees felled by the preternatural vigor of Dee and Eurydice's doggy-styling less than two hours earlier. Yves circled his finger around to the right. Raspberry followed it, as if hypnotized. Yves ended up pointing at the concrete pylon with the lavender-stained pizza-sized hole eaten into its face.
Yves brought his hand down flat.
Raspberry thought for a moment, her face blank. She paled to periwinkle and tilted her head up to gawk at the highway above them. "Oh, fuck me."
"Hopefully, it won't come to that," Yves said. He tried to stand with the lavender girl in his arms but his legs kept folding up under him, or the road kept slipping around beneath his feet. He could not tell which.
Raspberry managed a small laugh—"Ha"—but her eyes were wild and worried. Dee shoved the Jeep out from under the overpass' shadow. "Yves. Get up," Raspberry said. The humps on CeeCee's back thinned and stretched, first into discs, then webbed wings. "Get up, Yves." Dee pushed until the Jeep listed against far side of the on-ramp, well clear of the overpass. "Get up, babe," Raspberry pled, her arms trapped inside the overshirt tourniquet holding her together. "We gotta go."
Yves hung his head. "I'm so tired, Raz. There are things you don't know about me, either."
CeeCee's eyelids flittered up. The polished coal buttons of her eyes were too small for her round, wide face, fixing her visage in a silent but perpetual scream. "Dee," she said, arms searching blind. "Master. I. Black Cherry." She fought to hiss out each word. "I'm lying. She's lying. Black Cherry. About Galatea."
Yves sat up fast. Raspberry sloshed against his lap. Dee whirled around. Come on, Dee, Yves thought. Keep it together, don't fuck this up. He watched Dee watch CeeCee struggle for control of her own mouth. If there was ever a time for one of your hallmark flashes of intuition, it's now. Yves realized he was holding his breath.
CeeCee spluttered and coughed out words. "I didn't…she…"
Dee's open palm shot up. "That's enough, CeeCee. You're running out of nanomek and I need you to do something else."
"But she never—"
Dee's new voice crackled in the air. "Enough!" The yellow SUV's car alarm blared, hazard lights flashing before the alarm wound down. The three sorority sisters, a half-naked pile of tangled limbs and lips, cried out in lusty chorus. CeeCee quailed and fell silent.
Yves exhaled, slumping. Raspberry, bound by Yves' overshirt, flopped over to peer up at him. Yves shook his head. Dee can't know Black Cherry's secrets until she's ready to tell him, he thought, but only whispered, "Later." If she decides CeeCee's spoiled her fun, it's all over. She'll stop playing the supervillain game and any advantage we have will be lost. "After I get you out of here."
"CeeCee," Dee said, pointing to the moist three-way on the SUV's roof, "Can you control them? Through Black Cherry? You've got to get them out of here."
Nascent claws, little red nubs, hooked out from the raw scarlet wings stretching from CeeCee's back. The wings battered the air, powerful but uncoordinated, each attempting flight independent of the other. CeeCee lurched, arms raised.
The three coeds floundered their slippy way down to the ground. Only the brunette had retained her panties. The greasy silk underwear looked like she had worn it for weeks on end. The three sorority sisters collected their clothes in silence and shambled down the road, extras from a Romero movie.
The embryonic wing-claws grew long and sharp. One wing stabbed down, its claw piercing the pavement. The whorls of crimson and black sucked inward, gradually draining from CeeCee's turbulent surface, leaving behind a sallow yellow. Dee paced around her, keeping out of striking distance of the free wing, walking in a careful semi-circle until he stood with the purple-stained pylon directly behind him.
"Aw, shit," Raspberry quavered as Dee backed up a step, then two. "We've gotta go right fucking now."
Yves hoisted the lavender girl in his arms and rose to one knee. His vision danced with silvered sparks of snow and fire. Oh God, he thought, sagging his weight against his leg, not an aura. Not now. He blinked but the colorless pyrotechnics persisted. At least that explains the way I've been feeling; I'm not cracking up. The world filled with silent video static. I'm pre-migraine.
The lavender girl stretched to plant a soothing kiss on his neck. "What are the eight forces that sustain creation, Yves? I forgot."
Yves set his jaw. "Movement," he said, and stood straight.
"And stillness," Raspberry said, nestled against his chest.
CeeCee's free wing flopped in a wide circle before slamming into the pavement. Licks of red and black whipped around the amber woman's surface and vanished inward. Dee took another step backward.
"Extension," Yves called, striding forward.
"And contraction," Raspberry answered, hugging herself tight until she fit perfectly in his arms.
The red wings clawed at the pavement. CeeCee rocked forward to stay on her feet. Her black button eyes sunk into her head before she squeezed them shut. A red bolus rose up on her back between her wings. Dee stepped backward again. The pavement beneath his feet inclined to join the pylon behind him.
"Unification," Yves said, and broke into a run.
"And division," Raspberry whispered, gazing over his shoulder as the distance between them and the amber woman grew. "I love you, CeeCee. Run. Run."
CeeCee burst like a water balloon. Black Cherry fell away, fully formed and furious, sweating blood-nectar from every pore. CeeCee's shapeless remnants slithered over the pavement in honeyed waves. Black Cherry sprang to her feet, howling in rage, wings swooping in for the kill.
"Cherry," Dee's voice reverberated and the scarlet girl staggered.
Yves cleared the mouth of the overpass. The mid-morning sun overwhelmed the fading aural sparks. "Solidity," he said, and turned about.
Dee stood with his back to the tall, ferroconcrete pylon. Black Cherry swiveled to face him. Sanguine honey dripped from her quivering wing claws, her arms, her pouting mouth and flush sex. "Master."
Dee raised his arms high, left hand curled around his right fist. He poured every ounce of his strength into a backswing. His fist smashed into the pylon, blasting off chunks of cement spiked with shorn rebar. Yves ears rang in the roar. There was an instant of quiet.
"And fluidity," Raspberry said. CeeCee flowed away from the overpass in a creamy gush.
A jagged crack raced up the side of the pylon with a ripple of sharp noise, overlapping pistol shots. The pylon split along its length. A half-column of concrete ripped free of rebar and thumped down onto the road hard enough to bounce Yves off the ground and knock the silver Jeep an inch forward. The bridging highway above rocked on its foundations.
Black Cherry gazed upward, worry melting into wonder and delight, as the pylon began its slow topple toward her. Her lips curled in a lazy smile, heavy lidded eyes sliding shut. "Oh, Master."
"Splat," Dee said, and several hundred tons of concrete pylon crashed down upon them both.
Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy,
And sometimes I despair
The world will never see
Another man…like him.
—Crash Test Dummies, Superman's Song
Concrete fractured into ragged slabs as it fell and struck the ground. Dee and Black Cherry disappeared in an acrid storm of grit and pulverized rock. The noise was deafening, a rolling thunderclap. Ears ringing, Yves huddled on the pavement drawing himself around Raspberry as best he could.
Raspberry soliloquized at him, tone harsh but smile warm: "I'm made out of Jell-O, dumb-fuck. A little jiggle like this can't hurt me. Good thing I'm too scared to cum, though. All this hugging and sappy bullshit's got my cooze so creamy I’d frig away my last nanomek if I could." She looked away, sighing. "Black Cherry's right. I wanna stuff Dee's cock up my cunt so bad I get cross-eyed just thinking about it, but to tell you the truth, babe." The lavender girl shook her head. Concrete fines and dust nucleated in her hair, turning orchid petals into gray sandpaper. "You've made me a fag-hag. If you're looking for a beard, I'm your bitch. We could get a little apartment, you could do all your fudge-packing at home, and I'd felch all the jizz I'd ever need out of your ass."
"Alright, alright," Yves said, loosening his hold on the leering goo girl. "I can hear again. Now would you please shut your filthy fucking mouth. Where's CeeCee?"
Raspberry nodded to the left. CeeCee hulloed, "Over here, honey." CeeCee sprawled on the asphalt a few paces down the road, a heap of yellow, cream domes, as if someone had carved a reclining Buddha out of the world's biggest butter pat and left it melting on the pavement. "I'm just going to lie here awhile, if you don't mind."
Yves asked her, "Are you okay?"
"No."
"Are you going to be okay?"
"I'm not sure. I've never had so little nanomek to keep me going before. Honey, what happened? What on Earth was Dee thinking?"
Yves surveyed the wreckage. He saw no sign of Dee. A crimson puddle spread out from under the rubble, too thick and too fast to be Dee's blood unless nanomek had changed Dee in ways Yves did not want to think about. "Same as you," Yves told CeeCee, "to buy time. Time for Eurydice to put herself back together." He turned to the Jeep tucked beside the onramp. "Time for Nyx and Ursula to…" He squinted but could glean no clues from the sideways vehicle. "…to do whatever the Hell it is they've been doing in there. Time for us to retreat." One of the largest broken slabs of concrete thumped and shivered, raising a cloud of fines. Yves added, "Time for Dee to go mano y psicópata with Cherry."
Raspberry still dangled in Yves' arms. "But you're not going anywhere, are you?"
Yves clucked his tongue, watching the puddle ripple and wax into a pool, incarnadine and shadow entwined. "Nope."
She turned and glared at the growing pool, her eyes hard as true amethyst. "Then neither am I."
"You couldn't drag me away with wild horses," CeeCee said, staring up at the sky before admitting, "You'd need a bucket."
The thumping stopped. The slab grated over the pavement, a stone sarcophagus groaning open. Pale fingers reached up from beneath, found purchase, tensed, and pushed. The slab progressed another few inches. The bottom of the slab abraded into gravel. Fingers splayed and scrabbled but disappeared downward. Dee's muted swearing floated up. "Fucking physics!"
"Dee," Yves called out, amazed, relieved, but somehow, utterly unsurprised. "We're okay."
"Yves?" Dee's fingers reappeared from beneath the slab, their hunt for a handhold growing frantic. "Christ, Yves. How many times do I have to say, 'Get out of here' today before you actually get the Hell out of here?"
The ruby pool drew in on itself, doming in the middle. "I've got a few minutes," Yves lied. Dee's fingers danced around the perimeter of the slab where the crumbing concrete met the pavement. "Listen; are you squashed flat under there or something?"
"No, dammit, I'm harder than ferroconcrete, but ferro-fucking-concrete is harder than asphalt."
"You didn't lie down?" Yves asked.
"No, I didn't think of it. In comic books you don't have to worry about this kind of shit!"
"What the fuck are you two dickweeds talking about?" Raspberry demanded.
Yves stood up. "Our man of steel's been driven into the ground like a steel railroad spike." His elbows and shoulders burned from carrying Raspberry. "He's buried alive in the hardpan." The ruby dome rose into a ball. We may have to run after all.
"Bedrock," Dee corrected, annoyed, from a Dee-sized hole in the road. "Granite, I think."
"Who gives a shit?" Raspberry bounced in impatience. "Just punch your way out and kick psycho-twat's ass summore."
"I'm working on it," Dee said. Yves heard the crump of crumbling rock. "This isn't easy. I'm no Uma Thurman. How much time have I got left, Yves?"
"Master." Black Cherry unfurled, a rose blooming wet with morning dew. Her wings drooped, glistening and unformed. Her movements were twitchy and insectile. "You hurt me, Master." She paced in a little circle then folded up over a broken slab. "You hurt me so much." She rolled onto her back, luxuriating in a post-coital daze. "So much."
Dee was silent for a moment. "Thanks a bunch, Yves." The sounds of an avalanche in miniature spilled out from the hole.
Black Cherry glanced around. Her coy smile upended into a confused frown. "Master? Where are you?" Her head wings pulsed, glued to her pageboy haircut. She lazed onto her tummy and scooched to the end of the slab, streaking the concrete in a florid swath of fluid. She peeped over the edge. "Master?" She giggled down. "Oh, there you are. My noviluninium is waning, Master. Are you ready for me now? Or do you want me to play with Yves again? It's your choice, Master. Just as before." Her sly gaze flicked over Yves before she spoke to the hole in the pavement. "Is it time?"
Raspberry snorted, a guttural ch-hock! noise bubbling in her throat. She stuck her violet tongue out from between her lips, aiming carefully. The purple stains on the overshirt wrapped around her welled and spread. Raspberry grew cold in Yves' arms. Yves pinched her as hard as he could on the neck. She coughed and swallowed. Yves felt the soft, radiant warmth rekindle in her core and he relaxed his grip on her neck.
Something clanked inside the silver Jeep. Black Cherry pivoted on her ripe bottom, scissor-kicking to sit up, legs folding. She prized her diminutive wings away from her hair, angling them at the Jeep. Strings and filaments of gel drifted, lighter than air, in a hazy halo around her head.
"What did you do that for?" Raspberry wheezed at Yves.
"Don't you dare die for me or Dee," he told her.
A slim, lustrous black arm sprouted skyward from the driver's side window of the sideways vehicle. Its smooth, conical fingers and thumb fluxed into raptorial claws before hooking down into the canvas top.
"Ah," Black Cherry sighed, "of course. Just in the nick of time, too, imagine that." A second arm followed the first, fist clutching a torn book page and raising it high. "Our little heroine." Black Cherry peered at the nonsensical, spiraling scrawls of arcane formulae scribbled in black fountain pen ink across the crinkled paper. She shrugged. "She's the one I came for, Master. She helped you get away. She needs to die for that." The clawed hand flexed as the newcomer hauled herself into view. "She needs to die today…Wait." Black Cherry bounded to her feet, her head wings pricked up like the ears of a startled cat. "Who the fuck are you?"
Wide, red, oval-rimmed glasses, lenses chipped into splinters and flakes, sat askew on the newcomer's pert little nose. Long, plaited pigtails framed a porcelain white, china doll face and arced down into the Jeep in ropey licorice braids. Ebony glossed her liquid lips. A burnished onyx choker ringed her ivory neck above a cashmere poncho. A narrow but deep laceration slashed across a high, angular cheekbone. A single bead of jet black blood rolled down a cheek as pale as milk. The obsidian goth stared down in silence.
Wings of webby ink unfolded in sharp planes and geodesic formations from her back, holding her in place. She razored the poncho apart with a single slash of her clawed fingers. Strips of soft cloth fell away to reveal an iridescent, second skin, a living glaze of black volcanic glass, accentuating every curve of bone and swell of flesh,.
Black Cherry was the first to blink and step back. "What are you?"
The obsidian goth whipped off her useless glasses. She closed her eyes, daubed two gloved fingers against them. A perfect mask of black mascara coated her eyelids. Her eyes flicked open, their whites filling with starless night.
"We—are—U—Nyx," she breathed, and took flight.
"Oh, come on," Yves said. Unyx sailed high into the air on billowing, membranous wings. "Everyone's a superhero but me."
Black Cherry hunched, hands curled into fists, glaring up at Unyx through her eyelashes. Unyx dipped and dove, kite-tail braids whipping high and back. Red wing claws snapped up, aiming for the tender flesh below Unyx's ribs. Crimson struck lacquered black.
Yves flinched in the agonized noise, worse than fingernails across a blackboard. Needle-sharp claw-tips skittered over the Unyx's second skin. Black Cherry shrieked, threw her wings wide. Unyx bore down unhindered, her black talons ripping a gash between scarlet breasts. Black Cherry's single shriek stretched long without a stop for breath.
Unyx's thick-soled go-go boots smacked into the pavement. She wrenched one arm back, drawing out an arc of sanguine gel. She punched out with the other hand and thwacked the torn page over Black Cherry's jagged wound. The scribbled equations and gridline charts were lost as red nectar seeped into the cheap paper. Black Cherry's inner gel, swirling red-and-black, sucked the page inward.
Unyx rocked her hips. She sprung high and away, wings whomp-whomp-whomping and thrashing the air. Her braids flew before her face as she soared backward. Black Cherry lashed out with both hands, seized the ends of Unyx's trailing braids and hauled. Unyx's neck jerked down as her braids drew taut. The snarling scarlet girl smashed her fists into the pavement and Unyx slammed into the ground headfirst.
Unyx's thick choker collar nictitated into a shell over her face an instant before colliding with the ground. Unyx twitched. Her wings settled to the ground in drifts of black silk.
Black Cherry stepped astride Unyx's form. She wound the obsidian goth's braids around both her fists. The slash in Black Cherry's chest zippered shut and her snarl melted into a befuddled frown. Goosebumps dimpled her scarlet gel-flesh, making her shiver. "What's going on?"
The filigree of shadow, the dark skeins and spirals permeating Black Cherry's red gel, trembled and whirled just below her skin. Beneath the fading scar between her breasts, the threading veins bent and twisted into angular shapes and mad loops before snapping into focus as numbers and symbols in a dozen languages, modern and ancient. Gibberish equations invaded her gel-flesh like a mathematical virus. Tunneling worms of code crept up the curves of her breasts, encircled her dark nipples in even darker lines of sums and symbols before swarming outward. In moments her stomach and neck swam with a motile tattoo inked by a demented algebra student. "What did you do to me?"
Unyx pawed the road but said nothing. Equations scrolled up Black Cherry's arms and legs. The scarlet girl yanked on Unyx's braids, swung her up and over and back down hard, spraying chunks of asphalt into the air. Black wings wilted and collapsed into lumps.
Black Cherry hoisted Unyx up by the hair and screeched in her face. "I said what did you do to me?"
The black candy shell protecting Unyx's head peeled away to reveal Ursula, pale and unconscious. The wings on Unyx's shoulders melted and molded into a second pair of reedy arms, spindle neck and blank, egg-shaped head.
Nyx emerged to confront her creator. She wrapped her arms around Ursula's neck in a fierce, desperate hug, conveying more affection, anger, and defiance in that single gesture than anyone could speak in a thousand words.
"Fine," Black Cherry sighed. She unreeled Urusla's braids until the goth girl dangled to the ground. The growing math-tattoo breached the scarlet surface of Black Cherry's wings. Tension gathered in her gel as she prepared a final swing. "Then die."
"Do it," Ursula mumbled, eyelids fluttering, eyes rolled back.
Nyx craned her neck. One gaunt arm raised, too thin to support a hand. The tapered tip curved into a hook, its inward edged polished sharp.
"If you say so," Black Cherry shrugged, the living tattoo encroaching the very tips of her wings. She rocked her arms back, dragging Ursula along the pavement.
Nyx's hooked arm whistled down. She hesitated at the last instant, hook trembling above Ursula's creamy throat. Her skin grayed to a matte black.
Ursula grimaced. "Do it!"
Black Cherry poured power into her throw. Nyx turned her head, and, shuddering, slashed sideways. Black Cherry toppled backward. Ursula and Nyx skidded across the pavement.
Yves found his voice. "Oh, God, no."
"Did it work?" asked Dee from his hole in the pavement.
"Did what work?" Raspberry cried. "Ursula's dead!"
"Lookit," Yves whispered.
"You fucking asshole." Raspberry's tears burned little holes in Yves shirt. "You should have let me nuke the cunt. I don't care if…"
"For once in your fucking life would you just shut your mouth and lookit?" Yves hissed.
Raspberry purpled, then turned and lookited. Black Cherry sat up, perplexed. Numbers and symbols spun beneath the surface of her skin. She held two long, black braids, one in each hand. They danced in the air, totaling six feet of plaited pigtails, their ends shorn shear. The living tattoo completed a full circuit, and the scarlet girl was covered head to toe in a madman's idea of math homework.
Ursula propped herself up, blinking sleepily. The remains of her pigtails stuck out straight from either side of her head for a good half foot before puffing out into black pompom tufts.
"Well, shit," Raspberry grumped, "She's cuter than ever now."
"Then Ursula's okay," Dee said. "Thank God. Nyx too?" A rampart of granite pebbles and chips encircled the hole in the pavement. "Did it work?"
"I think Ursula's okay," Yves answered. The goth girl plopped down onto the pavement, exhausted and huffing. "More weary than wounded. Nyx is looking pretty gray, though, like a wool sweater. And I have no idea if anything worked because you didn't clue me in on your plan this time." More pebbles appeared. "Speaking of which, what the Hell are you doing? Trying to dig upwards?"
Dee's fingertips waggled above the ring of rock. "I've barely got one arm free down here and I'm trying to make some room. Superhuman strength is pretty useless when you're pinned in place by plate-freaking-tectonics." A finger stabbed out at an angle. "What's happening to Black Cherry?"
"She's covered in that magic square number stuff," Yves said. "And she's just…sitting there."
"Maybe it did work, then," Dee said.
"Master?" Black Cherry dropped the severed braids and tried to stand. She stepped on one sagging wing and flumped back down on her ass. The wings on her head shriveled and paled. "Master?"
Yves adjusted Raspberry's weight in his arms, taking the edge off the fire in his shoulders. "What were U and Nyx trying to do? Magic, right? Not number games. Real magic." The lines of cipher wrapped around Black Cherry's body looked less like crazed math and more like an elegant but incomprehensible foreign language. "But magic to do what?"
A face hidden by a drab olive hoodie and green, wraparound Onasis sunglasses poked out of the driver's side window. "To take the Devil out of Black Cherry," Eurydice answered, pushing herself up by the palms and flipping down onto the pavement.
Black Cherry wobbled to her feet, gawping at Eurydice. Her head wings furled inward and melted away. The wings on her back faded and shrank until they were little more than the toy devil-wings of a Halloween costume. The green girl turned to her.
"Hello, baby sister," Eurydice said.
Black Cherry twittered, pointing at Eurydice but peering over her shoulder. "You made another one, Master?" She shook her head. "See how replaceable she is. Not like me. There's nothing like me. I'm nothing." Her bravado failed. "I'm alone." She glanced about, desperate and lost. "Be with me." Her gaze fell on Eurydice, darted to Yves and Raspberry, to CeeCee, then Ursula and Nyx, before circling back to Eurydice. "Become me. Name me."
Ursula rolled onto her side, reaching for the hem of Eurydice's fatigues. "Hurry. The binding won't last. She's strong." She smiled before slipping back into exhaustion. "Just like you."
Eurydice nodded, pulling away the glasses and the hood. Jellied dreadlocks tumbled free. Black Cherry tried to sneer. "So young, he made you so young this time. Just like I remember you." Black Cherry pressed her palm over her mouth. "I remember you? I do." Her hand trembled as she pointed. "I know you…"
"You know me of old," Eurydice finished for her. "Yes. Things echo. But echoes have never been enough. Not for you."
Black Cherry backpedaled, almost tripping herself up on crumbling cement. "I don't understand."
"Neither did I at first." Eurydice unzipped her hoodie, molding the pliant garment into a peculiar sash, leaving her left breast bare. "Now that I've seen you, though, everything's so clear. We've done this so many times, you and I." She stepped closer. "But things are different this time. Everything can be different, if you let it." Black Cherry stared wide-eyed and silent. Eurydice pressed forward. "You don't have to be alone. Be with frends, with us. Become yourself." She held out her hand. "Adrasteia."
Black Cherry fumbled backward. "Ide," she gasped, and at first Yves thought she said, I Dee, or maybe Idly. She bumped into a fallen slab and sat down hard. "It is you, Ide.".
Eurydice reached out to her, smiling. "Call me Eurydice."
"What the fuck is this shit?" Raspberry called out. Eurydice turned and shushed her but Raspberry just stared. "Jesus fuck, check out those tits."
Yves whispered, "Nursemaids."
"What?" Raspberry asked.
"They were sisters," Yves answered. "Nursemaids." Another piece clicked into place in the puzzle.
["...That depends, is Cherry Cupcake Dee's psycho bitch ex-girlfriend from Hell..."]
"Black Cherry's always been the eldest before," Yves explained. "But not this time. That's what's different."
["...No one's ever gone lime first time before..."]
Eurydice smiled, opened her hands to Black Cherry again.
["...Hello, baby sister..."]
"Dee made Galatea first," Yves said.
"Wait. Nursemaids? Of what?" Raspberry narrowed her eyes at the ample curve of Eurydice's bare breast. "Buffalo?"
"Gods."
"Names," Black Cherry said. "Why do you have so many names?"
Eurydice's brow crinkled in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Ide," Black Cherry said, and stood up. "Eurydice. Galatea." The little wings on her back flushed red. "Shamhat. Meliboea." Black Cherry advanced, her sneer returning. Eurydice dropped back. "Brunhild. Marya." Two curved horns budded from the top of the scarlet girl's head, opening as embryonic wings.
"I'm clueless," Raspberry hissed.
From her muddle on the pavement, CeeCee said, "We know, honey. We know."
Eurydice zippered her hoodie. "Adrasteia, please. I used up so much nanomek to put myself back together after the crash, just to talk to you. Listen to me, please."
Black Cherry tipped her head, listening to some distant voice. The wings on her back grew, gorged on blood red gel. "Zeus loved you best."
Eurydice shook her head. "You don't understand, Adrasteia."
"That's not my name," Black Cherry muttered. The symbols tattooed on her skin writhed and danced. "Zeus loved you best. Heracles loved you best. Sigurd loved you best." The little wings on her head spread atremble. "Dee loves…They all loved you best!"
"No." Eurydice fell back against the Jeep. "You can't love what you don't trust. And, in the end, none of them trusted us. Ever. Because of you," Eurydice added, eyes brimming with tears and defiance, "Adrasteia."
"That's not my name!" The mathematical formulae binding Black Cherry's flesh distorted, wavered, and finally faded into black veins marbling crimson gel, devoid of pattern or meaning. Her great wings opened, spanned the road, and a scarlet curtain of crushed velvet dropped between Yves and Eurydice. A battle cry built in Yves' throat.
"Hey, fruitcake!"
Yves clapped his mouth shut and spun about.
Tomoe strolled up the double yellow line in the center of the access road, white blouse ruffling in the sudden wind, little black miniskirt hugging above her knees, snake-skin purse slung over one shoulder. She dismissed Yves with a wave, dark eyes shining. "Pfft, not you." She pointed. "That fruitcake. The crazy lady with wings."
Black Cherry slumped. "This nick-of-time thing really gets tedious. Who ever heard of a team that doesn't team up? Ah, well, who is it now. Another shocker reveal?" She turned. The curtain rose on Eurydice, squashed against the silver Jeep, trying to peek around Black Cherry's head-wings. Black Cherry stood dumbstruck before stuttering, "Tiamat?"
"Say, there's an old nickname." Tomoe folded her arms. "Who's been giving the crazy lady flashbacks?"
Eurydice poked up a hand. "That'd be me. Sorry."
From his hole, Dee asked, "Are you okay, Eurydice?"
"Yeah. Plan B didn't work, though, so get your ass outta there."
"Working on it." Chunks of granite flew up. "Just a minute longer."
Black Cherry shrugged with arms and all four wings. "Tiamat," she whispered, pacing this way and that in the middle of the road, eyeing Tomoe from every angle. "You can't be here."
"No rule against it," Tomoe said, one black pump tapping on the pavement.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Raspberry asked.
"Me?" She met Yves gaze, matched his poker face. "Nothing."
Yves smirked, "Ah." He went down on one knee and lay Raspberry down onto the pavement.
"That, that's right," Black Cherry said, confidence returning. "You can't interfere."
"Yep. I can't interfere. Now there's a rule I never break."
"What're you doing?" Raspberry whispered to Yves.
"Don't worry," he whispered back. "You'll be fine. Besides, my arms have gone numb and I think I'm slipping a disk."
Wing claws clicked together over Black Cherry's head. "You can't interfere. So what are you going to do?" She edged closer to Tomoe. "Stand there and watch?"
"Pretty much," Tomoe answered, "Yeah." She adjusted the strap of her purse, looking bored.
Yves could not take any more. "You're asking the wrong questions." He shook his head, wore an idiot grin. "You stupid psycho-bitch."
Black Cherry shot him a worried glance. In the distance, an engine revved up.
"The question is," Yves said as the engine grew louder, "how did she get here so fast?"
"Oh." Tomoe brightened. She stepped to the side, inspecting a finger nail. "I drove."
A rose Mini Cooper raced around the bend in the access road. It bounced up a jagged slab of fallen concrete, soared through the air, and bore down upon Black Cherry, car horn meep-meeping. The car's grimacing oval grill rippled, split, and thrust out a single, diamond-tipped, ramrod spike.
Black Cherry reared back, eyes bugging. "Oh, shi—" The scarlet girl flew backward, impaled. She threw her wings around the little car, claws raking the sides and scourging the rear bumper.
Eurydice swore—"Whoa-shit!"—and dove away as the charging Mini Cooper clashed Black Cherry against the silver Jeep. The sideways truck folded up like a cardboard box. The little rose car disappeared in the vortex of crushing wings. Black Cherry's face contorted in some intense, silent emotion that Yves could not distinguish between exultation or exquisite pain.
Scarlet wings ruptured, falling away in splattering petals. SB ascended in the rain of crimson honey, muscles bunching beneath her tight dress, monstrous pink scimitar twirling a glorious arc in her arms. The hooked tip of the blade sped downward, shearing through the carriage of the Jeep. SB yanked back on her swing as the scimitar's curved edge cleaved into Black Cherry's hair. Black Cherry twittered nonsense words, shut her eyes and chewed on her fingers.
SB's rosy skin and coppery dress were plastered with cherry nectar. Black Cherry pushed her twitching fingers between the folds of her sex before mashing them back into her mouth. SB glowered, muttering, "Worse than Atlantis." She hefted the scimitar out of Black Cherry's hair and the scarlet girl fell into a post-coital fit, head rocking and feet drubbing the pavement. Her pageboy bob now bore a perfect, midline part.
SB lanced the scimitar down into the asphalt, crossed her arms and propped herself against the sword's hilt. "Well, cousin," SB sighed, "I hate family dramas so I'm going to cut this short." She exchanged a quick glance with Eurydice, who nodded. "Your sister, for some reason, wants to present you with a choice. Do you think you could, just this once, get over yourself, move on, and maybe—Oh, I dunno—try for happiness instead of the usual boiling bunny bullshit?" Severed wings wriggled past her, as flat and wide as Persian carpets, crawling up to bind with Black Cherry's back. "Aw, eeew. So much worse than Atlantis. Anyway, you can either cheer up, emo kid, or you and I can keep doing what we're doing now and you can cum yourself to death. Your choice."
Black Cherry gulped, "Who were you?"
"Oh, you know, you and your sister filled them with honey." She plucked her scimitar out of the ground and slung it over her shoulders. "I brought the milk. I offered them my horn." Her diamond-white eyes flashed at Yves. He felt a guilty flutter in his stomach and heat in his face. "They gifted it back," she finished and leveled the scimitar at Black Cherry's crotch. The scarlet girl crossed and uncrossed her legs beneath it. "So what's it going to be?" SB asked.
"Tiamat," Black Cherry spluttered. "Tiamat?" SB shrugged, moved aside, but kept her scimitar in striking range of Black Cherry's belly and sex. "Are you going to let her do this?"
"Sorry." Tomoe worried an unruly cuticle with her teeth. "There's nothing I can do. Can't interfere, remember? And call me Tomoe, or 'T' at least. Can't use the old nickname any more thanks to Gary fucking Gygax."
"I'm running low on nanomek and patience, little cousin." SB etched little circles around Black Cherry's belly button with the keen tip of her blade, making the scarlet girl shiver and pant, her cream-candy skin prickled with brandied dewdrops. "And frankly I'm inclined to keep cutting and cutting. But that's my dick talking and it's not my decision to make. What say you: sister, or sword?"
Black Cherry's lips curled up into that lazy, coquettish smile that Yves had grown to loathe. "I'll take the third option," she said, and rolled her eyes upward.
Yves, SB, and Raspberry followed her gaze, and swore in a ragged chorus. "Oh, shit."
Three half-naked coeds—the blonde, brunette, and redhead E-Z sorority sisters—their nests of bedraggled hair twisting serpentine in the wind, perched on the corrugated steel barrier running along the lip of the overpass, almost two stories above the litter of ripped asphalt and craggy hunks of ferroconcrete spiked with barbs of distressed rebar. Their arms shot out straight into the air, releasing their clutches of clothes. Yves thought of Hollywood Frankenstein monsters, or swimmers positioning themselves to dive off a high board. His blush faded and the butterflies in his stomach grew icicles.
"What the—Oh, yuck," Dee groused from his hole as the last of the coeds' skank-wear pelted down onto the road. "Why is it raining soiled panties?"
"Shut up, Dee." Yves limped to the center of the road, never taking his eyes of the girls above. "Black Cherry's got the skank-bots back and she's going to kill them."
Yves heard a growl and hiss from the hole in the road, sounding more locomotive than human. Yves spoke as fast as he could. "Dee no-it's-too-late any move and they're dead."
Tomoe paled. "I'm so sorry. I can't interfere, I really can't." She stared at her hands. "If I do, it just gets worse, so much worse. So I can't. I can't."
"I know," Dee said.
Tomoe looked up at the three girls. She balled her fists. "I can't!" Yves felt the breeze blow stronger and the ambient temperature drop.
Dee spoke in his new voice—"No more, Tomoe,"—and Tomoe gasped in relief, letting her arms fall, her purse slip from her shoulders. The electric tension in the air evaporated.
She wasn't apologizing for staying out of it, Yves realized, She was begging someone to stop her from getting into it. Yves turned to SB. The rose girl stepped back, choking up on the scimitar's grip. The first pinpricks of migraine pain skewered behind Yves' eyes. "I need a minute," he said.
"You won't get it," Black Cherry grinned, sitting up.
I need to think this through. Yves held up an open palm. "You kill them, SB kills you, and you know it." How is this supposed to end? Just like I said this morning: 'Galatea divided, brothers and friends dead.' How do I stop it from happening all over again if Cherry Cupcake's too much of a psycho-bitch to let it go? The pinpricks grew into stiletto points and Yves had to bow his head. Black Cherry. Party tonight. Skank-bot army. Dee sublimed. Eurydice fragmenting. Galatea divided.
["… She's lying. Black Cherry. About Galatea…"]
"Oh." Yves stood straight. "Duh."
From the hole in the road, Dee said, "Yves?"
"Let her go," Yves answered. "You already know what you have to do."
"SB," Dee ordered without any hesitation, "let her go."
SB shouldered her scimitar, fuming. Black Cherry sat up and brushed herself off. "Well, this was fun."
"Cherry," Dee said, "set the girls free, safely, or I let SB finish if she wants."
The huge scimitar thrummed in SB's hands as she rolled her shoulders. "SB wants," the rose girl purred. Eurydice came up behind her and gave SB a fierce hug.
"Of course," Black Cherry said, swaggering into the road and hopping onto a fallen concrete slab. "As soon as I'm clear. I'm sorry we were interrupted, Master. I could stay and play," she said, eying Yves, "but there's a choice you have to make. I told you I had work to do, remember?" She scampered over the rubble, crossing the road to the broken pylon. "Well, I did it, and it's perfect, just like I said. We'll be perfect, you and I, tonight." She stopped to peer down into the hole in the road. "Won't we, Master?"
"Go," Dee said.
Black Cherry sniffed and pouted. "You're not scared at all. Why not, Master? You were so scared last time. Why…"
"Go, Cherry."
"You're ready, aren’t you?" Black Cherry's laughter sparkled. "You're ready for me, finally. You're ready!"
"Go, Cherry."
Black Cherry, giggling and giddy, leapt onto the broken pylon. Claws and fingers punched their own handholds in the concrete. She loped up, her wings working as a third pair of limbs. She back-flipped up and around the lip of the overpass, onto the highway, and out of sight.
Raspberry fought against the straightjacket of Yves' overshirt tourniquet. "I can't be the only person who didn't understand a single damn thing that just fucking happened, can I?"
Yves shushed her, watching the three coeds balanced on the barrier railing. They rocked with a sudden tremor. The blonde and redhead's glassy, blank expressions came alive with alertness and confusion. The brunette only stood and swayed in her underwear. The blonde and redhead yipped in surprise when they noticed their surroundings and hopped back from the ledge, but wailed and fled down the highway in a hobbled, crouching run when they noticed their nudity. The brunette rolled her head and trembled again.
"Come on," Yves whispered. The brunette danced about on the railing, lifting one leg and then the other, pulling off her panties. "Oh, shit." Yves cast about. "Can anyone do the bed trick?"
Eurydice, SB, CeeCee, and Tomoe all raised their hands. Raspberry raised a delicate foot. The brunette's underwear dropped into the hole in the pavement. It was wet enough to splat. "Aw, man," Dee said. "The one fetish I don't have and I'm buried in it."
The brunette dove her fingers into her sex and drew out a blue-chrome, oval vibrator. She gave it a twist and shut it off. She raised it slowly to her face. She stared, aghast and unbelieving.
Yves squinted. "What the Hell?"
"Oh thank God," the brunette gurgled, toppled behind the railing, and sprawled onto the embankment in a blissful coma.
The word is about, there's something evolving,
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving.
They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution's near,
But to me it seems quite clear:
It's all just a little bit of history repeating.
—Propellerheads (feat. Miss Shirley Bassey), History Repeating
Study the myths and legends of cultures across the world, and many uncanny similarities soon appear: great floods, winged dragons, serpentine women, cannibal kings, cunning imps, and mad oracles are just a few of the common mythological motifs. Look closer still and the stories of myth, the sequence of events tying these mythic motifs together, take on a familiar rhythm: a hero must journey into the underworlds of Hell to recover what was lost; a heroine must endure trials of pain and disgrace to free her beloved from enchantment; hubris is punished, courtesy rewarded; a prophecy of doom is only fulfilled when someone tries to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Many of these coincidences can be explained by the myth-makers' proximity in time and geography. Roman myths mirror earlier Greek myths because the Romans adopted the legends and religions of the peoples they conquered. But the continual repetition of themes, symbols, and events have lead some scholars to hypothesize the existence of a monomyth, a central story ingrained so deep in social fabric and psyche of the human condition that it is the seed for all others. Attempts to distill the monomyth from the corpus of world legend have met with only modest success. The failure to find the monomyth is not one of method, but of point of view, and the monomyth will remain hidden until the mythographer considers the possibility that the monomyth is not an archetype of the mind, but an artifact of history. Instead of the same story being retold over and over in slight variation, the same situation, the same sequences of events, had actually recurred, playing out again and again, throughout history and across the world, by the same players under different names and, most importantly, different ingredients.
Until now.
-From the introduction to Deiter Detwiler: The Hero with a Thousand Flavors, by Ursula Frost, 2nd Printing 2009
Freeing his elbows did the trick. Dee pried his chest and legs from the crushing strata of granite beneath the pavement, dug through rubble, and hauled ass onto the asphalt. Grit got everywhere and itched like crazy.
"Some superman," Raspberry said as Dee emerged, one hand shoved into the seat of his pants, "scratching his ass to get glad." She wiggled in her impromptu straightjacket by Brooks Brothers. "He took his damn sweet time, too."
Eurydice knelt behind Raspberry and encouraged the lavender girl to recline into her green gel-flesh. Raspberry lay back with little grace. Eurydice reached around in silence, plucking at the knotted sleeves below Raspberry's breasts. Raspberry snickered at the green girl, "I was about to suggest you frig a few gallons of cum down that hole and grease him out."
Eurydice perked up. "Hey, really? That’s exactly what I was gunna do! Ellagic and citric minds must think alike." She tugged the cuff out of the knot. "But I'm too low on nanomek."
Raspberry flushed violet. "I was joking. You, uh, can really cum that much?"
"Oh, sure. Just for starters." Eurydice paused to watch Dee fuss with his cindery underwear. "That man really gets my motor running. Oh, Raz, don't cry. What's wrong?"
Amethyst tears dashed down, eating little pits into the blacktop. "I wanna get laid!"
Eurydice clucked. "That dick is Mine, girl." The knot came undone at last. "But maybe we can work something out." She peeled Yves' shirt away from Raspberry's chest.
Raspberry pulled away fast. "No, don't."
"You've got enough nanomek to hold yourself together, don't you?"
Raspberry shrugged. The overshirt yawned. Her nipples stiffened and caught the material, the midline of her breasts and midriff peeping out. "Yeah, but that's not it." She settled back into Eurydice's lap, gazing across the road.
Yves was helping Ursula pick through the concrete debris beneath the overpass. They moved from slab to slab, Ursula clinging to Yves waist, Yves supporting her by the shoulders. Raspberry undulated, a single wave rippling out from her core. The shirt-sleeves bulged, filling with lavender gel until her fingers wriggled out from the cuffs. Eyes locked on the bishi and goth girl across the street, Raspberry raised a forearm and scraped her lips over the sturdy cotton, breathing deep and shuddery. "This tastes sooo much fuckin' better than the mixing bowl."
Ursula cast about. "They've got to be somewhere."
"Your glasses?" Yves asked.
Ursula turned in his arms. "Does it look like we need glasses?"
Yves still startled each time she—Not "she," "they"—moved against him. Earlier that morning, standing together before Bee's apartment, he and Ursula had held hands. The hallway became a sauna and Ursula's hand had felt as warm, clammy, and shaky as his. But that was all before Ursula met Nyx. When he had clambered over the broken concrete beneath the overpass and reached down to help her up—"Them," damn it, help "them" up—it was the first time he had touched Unyx.
Unyx's hand had felt cool and dry, fluid but not liquid, and utterly frictionless. He had shook hands with a ghost. He had looked down at her face and saw his own image double reflected in eyes of polished obsidian. No irises, no whites, not even eyebrows, just shining black orbs in a shadow eye-mask in the shape of infinity (∞). One loop of the eye-mask had arched up her milk-white forehead (oO), Unyx's version of cocking her eyebrow.
And then Yves had blurted, "Ben Franklin!"
Now Yves looked into Unyx's black-on-black eyes again. "No, you don't," he said. "Those glasses did look good on you, though. On Ursula."
Unyx softened and smiled. "Yeah, they did. We'll have to fix them, maybe take out the lenses, and put in flat glass."
"So Ursula doesn't need them anymore?" Yves decided to come clean with his fear. "Ursula's still in there, right?"
"Of course I am." The eye-mask dwindled and drained away, revealing Ursula's eyes, the irises neither hazel nor emerald but shining ebony. "I have nanomek contacts now," Ursula said. "I can see gravity. We, Nyx and I, are Unyx when we both want to be." She shrugged. "We just want to be Unyx a whole lot, maybe even all the time from now on. I'm sorry, Yves, I know this must be freaking you out." She giggled and imitated his voice, "'Ben Franklin!' You still haven't explained that."
"Tell me what we're looking for, first," Yves said.
"My hair." Ursula touched a pom-pom tufted end of one of her shorn, horizontal pigtails. "My braids. I can't find them anywhere. Not here, not now…" She stared of into the middle distance somewhere past Yves' left ear. "Not ten minutes into the past or future." She ghost-squeezed his shoulder. "We need to find my hair, Yves, or we're all royally fucked. Nyx cut as subtly as she could, but even meliae can’t cut sharp enough to sever such a strong sympathetic connection."
"Ten minutes where? Sharp enough to what? Wait, your hair?"
"No fair." She shook her head, whacking Yves with a pigtail. "Oops, sorry. I want my answer: Why 'Ben Franklin'?"
"Caloric theory," Yves said. Ursula looked blank. "Look, I may have taken English for Engineers in college, but I know my history of science. Ben Franklin thought that electricity was a fluid. Before modern atomic theory, all sorts of stuff was considered fluid: electricity, light, heat and cold, were all supposed to be a kind of dry goop. I touched your hand, touched Nyx, and the first thing I thought of was Ben fucking Franklin and his fucking electric-heat goo." Something clicked in his head and his migraine returned with a vengeance. "Oh, no, not Benjamin Franklin. Do not tell me Nyx boned Franklin in a past life or something. I can't take any more of that kind of crap."
Ursula laughed hard enough to make her stumble. She cinched her arms tighter about Yves waist and he gave her shoulders a supporting hug. He had to hook his arm in her armpit or risk slipping off her near-frictionless, second skin. Ursula puffed, pressing her cheek to Yves' ribs. "Oof, so little nanomek left, I need to be careful."
"I saw that," Raspberry cried out from across the street. "Oldest trick in the book, baby-butch bitch!" But Eurydice waggled her and CeeCee, still lying supine on the side of the road, gave Ursula a thumbs-up.
Ursula stuck her tongue out at all three of them; to Yves relief, it was as pink as ever, not black. "Anyway," she said, "Nyx doesn't remember fucking any Founding Fathers. She's different from the others. Not a meliae, really; something else."
"What the heck is she made of, anyway?" Yves asked.
"Just what you said: electric-heat goo. Sort of. Black Cherry mixed her from Devil's Food pudding and about a pint of latex paint."
Yves massaged his forehead, knowing it would do little for his migraine. "But those two things don’t mix. At all."
"No, they don't," Ursula agreed, "but they gave the nanomek a framework to work its magic, to mix her essence, not just her physical substance." She pulled away, testing her own balance. "You know your history of science, I know my alchemy. Nyx is phlogiston, the terra pinguis et fluida: the black blood of the Earth."
"You mean oil."
"She means Black Blood of the Earth," Tomoe cackled, hopping from one slab to the other, snake-skin purse swinging on its strap. "That reminds me: I wonder what Egg Shen is up to? Took him clubbing about two centuries ago and he never called back, the bastard." She reached an adjacent slab. "Hey, little sisters. Is your last name Exposition, by any chance? You're better at it than me."
"It's Frost." Ursula looked Tomoe up and down. "'Tiamat,' huh?" She smirked. "How many hit dice you got?"
Tomoe harrumphed, then leaned close and took up one horizontal pigtail in each hand. "Handlebars," she drawled, giving Ursula's hair a gentle-back-and-forth tug. She stood straight, hands on hips, and surveyed the whole Ursula/Nyx package. "I'd ride that like a bicycle."
"Oh, ha ha…Oh. Oh, shit. Yves." Ursula turned, eyes glittering in alarm. "Black Cherry. Black Cherry must have my hair."
"Uh, I've got be honest." Yves shrugged. "So what? She's got Galatea, she's planning to mass rape-murder about fifty college guys, and then ending the world. I think we need to prioritize a bit here. What am I missing?" An engine revved somewhere above them.
"I haven't had a haircut since I was twelve." It was Yves' turn to look blank, so Ursula continued, "Remember all that sympathetic magic stuff I talked about? How my soap established a connection between me and Galatea, so I could find her? Well, a decade worth of my hair, all cut off at once, is the strongest sympathetic connection to me anyone could possibly have, other than some fresh blood. It's better than any voodoo doll; it's a perfect stand-in for me, for my body." The humming motor drew near. "If Black Cherry knows anything about magic, she can turn me—and Nyx—into her skank-bots with it, and then use us to control anyone we have a sympathetic connection with."
"Your homemade soap," Yves said in dawning dread. "Galatea used it. Dee too."
"And the girl at Starbucks," Ursula said.
Yves thought about it. "You mean the one with the great—"
"Yeah," Ursula butted in, blushing silver as a rose Mini Cooper sped down the highway off ramp toward them.
"Black magic is just like VD," Tomoe said, nodding. The Mini Cooper zipped past, horn meep-meeping a friendly greeting. "But you don't even get to cum first."
Dee contemplated his navel, plumbing for pebbles. The rose Cooper pulled up beside him, idling. The passenger door popped open, the front seat pushed up to the glove compartment. Four gallons of bottled water sloshed in the rear foot well. The brunette EZ coed lay unconscious on the narrow back bench. "She's wearing your dress," Dee said.
The little car's AM radio crackled to life. "You want her naked?"
"No," Dee said, straightening his muscle shirt and bending in, "but I didn't think someone else could wear it. You can divide?" He moved the four bottles onto the road.
"Not exactly," came SB's voice from the radio. "Only one part of me can really come off. I can make all sorts of things, though."
Dee pinched the coppery fabric between his thumb and forefinger. "It feels…real. Not rubbery or kinky at all."
"You sound disappointed. I locked it. It's real, and hers to keep. Look, could you take her out, please? I don't wanna change back with her still inside me—don't know her near well enough—and I feel really stupid talking through the radio."
Dee eased his arms around the brunette and lifted her out. "You didn't find the others?"
The car's engine cut off. The chassis glinted liquidly, collapsed like an accordion before spindling into SB with a familiar metallic sigh. "I did, but a state trooper picked them up first." She read Dee's panicked expression and added, "Don't worry. Most people don't come this way unless they're drawn in somehow. And besides, the local patrollers are used to some seriously weird shit."
The brunette in Dee's arms yawned, eyes blinking. She tipped her head.
SB stood two feet away, rose-red and buck-naked, candy floss cornrows drifting in the gentle breeze, flaccid cock dangling to her knees. She flashed her diamond grin. "Why hullo there."
The brunette squeaked, latching herself around Dee's chest. Confusion clouded her brow. Her fingers tickled over his back, feeling yielding skin covering marble-hard muscle. She tilted her head up with exaggerated care.
"Please don't faint," Dee said, trying for his most disarming smile.
She fainted.
"Fuck."
SB lugged the water jugs over to the far side of the street, proffered two to Eurydice and Raspberry. The green and lavender girls tore open the bottle's plastic tops and guzzled. SB called across the road. "Hey, Unyx!"
Beneath the overpass, Ursula turned, black eye-mask flowing into place over her eyes. "Yeah?"
"C'mon over."
"'Kay."
SB unscrewed the top of the third bottle and knelt beside CeeCee. The amber woman lay on the pavement, slowly liquefying. "Are you going to be okay?" SB asked her.
"Not without a lot of nanomek—and I mean a lot—very soon." She reached up. "But some water will see me through for a little while. Thanks, honey." She filled out as she drank, her half-melted curves coalescing until she looked less like a runny butter sculpture and more like a record-breaking slice of creamy cheesecake molded into a big titty momma of rock and roll.
Unyx wobbled over, her candy coating of glossy black swirled with matte gray. "'Zup?"
SB passed her the last bottle. A few feet away, Raspberry and Eurydice chugged down the last of their water. They tossed the imploded plastic bottles over their shoulders into the fallow field behind them. They belched in near unison and dissolved into giggles.
Unyx took a few sips and handed it back.
"Wait," said Raspberry, the water spreading through her gel restoring her to a healthy jiggle. "That's all you need? After all that badass kung fu magic shit?"
Unyx arched her eye-mask. "Nyx gets the water she needs from Ursula."
Eurydice wrinkled her nose. "Oh, ew."
Raspberry's amethyst eyes sparkled. "Wicked!"
"Huddle up, girls," said SB, "We gotta talk." Unyx hunkered down and CeeCee scooted close. "Listen," SB said, voice low, "I'm running low on nanomek, enough to make me nervous." She hooked a thumb. "CeeCee's got one butt-cheek in the big freezer in the sky."
"Now that's just silly," CeeCee said. "It's true, but silly."
"Anybody else?" SB asked.
"I fragment awful fast," Eurydice replied, "I burn nanomek to stay coherent. And after that crash? I'm damn low."
"We're going gray," Unyx said, "that can't be good."
Raspberry sniffed the tails of her shirt. "I've never needed a hot beef injection more in my life."
"You're less than a day old," CeeCee insisted, "and you've been saying that every fifteen minutes since you were born. So what are we going to do?"
Raspberry blushed purple and looked across the street. Tomoe and Yves traded withering witticisms.
Eurydice shook her head. "We can't ask him. You don't know what he's been through."
"What if he…" Raspberry made a hollow fist and pumped up and down above her crotch.
"Where's the fun in that?" CeeCee protested.
Raspberry's blush deepened into a raging indigo. "I—we—that is…You know. Watch."
"Oh, honey." CeeCee patted the lavender girl on her mane of orchid petals. "That man's turned you into a blushing violet."
"Yves is out for the count," Unyx said. "He's been up over thirty-six hours, he's had the shit kicked out of him two, three times now, and he's running on empty calories, caffeine and adrenaline. He's amazing, but he's only human."
SB pursed her lips, nodding. She stood up, scraping her hands together, a coppery one-piece dress settling over her firm lines and gentle curves. "Let me see what I can do about that."
"Besides," Eurydice said, watching SB swagger over to Yves and Tomoe, "we're going to need a lot. Like, a whole lot. I'm talking pints."
Unyx, CeeCee, Raspberry, and Eurydice all craned their necks, smooth and slow. Dee stood under the overpass across from Yves, a brunette coed in his arms, chestnut hair falling in ringlets into his face. He returned their burning gazes, oblivious.
"What?" he said.
Yves' migraine fissured his thinking. "I'm sorry, Tomoe. What did you say?"
Tomoe held out the two pills again. "Little. Yellow. Different. Come on, it's a perfect straight line."
"Tomoe, look." Yves felt the mad desire to drill a hole in his skull; anything to relieve the pressure-pain. He forgot what he was going to say.
SB sauntered up, her usually tight one-piece dress flowing loose past her knees. "Hey, T, Yves. Wow, Yves, you look like shit."
Yves tried to smile, grateful for the rescue, but only affected a grimace. "Well, I feel like shit." He managed to put two thoughts together. "So at least there's symmetry." His knees began to buckle.
SB steadied him, her grip strong and cool on Yves' bare forearm. "Yves, you've got to take a break. You're dead on your feet." He lost what she said next to the miasma of migraine. SB's thumb slipped under the strap of his tan, sleeveless tee shirt, massaged a pressure point in the hollow of his collar bone. The pain and fatigue faded enough for him to focus. "Ride me, Yves."
He found his balance. "What?"
"Welcome back," SB smirked. Her grip slid down his arm and she placed her hand in his, careful to avoid the gauze bandage on the pad of his thumb. "I said, 'Take a ride with me, Yves.' Back to SRU. There's something there that I want to give you." Tomoe coughed. SB glared. "What now?" Tomoe unsnapped the top of her purse and pulled out a plain, glass mason jar filled with strawberry-red jam. SB's expression softened. "You knew? Of course you knew. And you're okay with it?"
Tomoe held out the jar. "Are you kidding? I've been watching this bit for weeks." SB took the jar with her free hand and Tomoe added, "Give the knight his sword. After all, you haven't had this good a candidate in forever, seems like."
SB took a step back and tugged on Yves arm. "C'mon, Yves. Eurydice and her pals are running on empty and looking at Dee like he was the Exxon Valdese. You don't want to be here for what's about to happen next."
Yves shook his head. "Nothing Dee does surprises me any more, not after the skank-bot gangbang. The world works different for him, that's all. I just need to figure out the rules." SB smiled and tugged again, and this time Yves followed her. "But I can always work out the rules later. Or from a minimum safe distance."
SB blew a kiss over Yves' shoulder. "See ya 'round, T."
"I thought she said she, uh, wanted to watch?" Yves asked, wondering, What the Hell have I gotten myself into? At least I can't blame Dee this time.
["…we're so lucky Dee chose you…"]
Or can't I?
"She's watching," SB assured him, leading him around the slabs of concrete. "She was watching, she always will be watching. She's T, and I'm her cheeseburger."
"I'm just going to pretend I understood that," said Yves, "and not say anything."
"Good plan."
Eurydice waved Dee over. She burned a few nanomek muttering in ultrasound, too fast and high pitched for Dee to hear. "He's faking it, you know. His obliviousness, I mean. He always knows exactly what I want, even before I want it, and he teases and teases until I can't take any more." Dee ambled forward, his expression puzzled. "Get ready for the hardest foreplay of your lives, girls," Eurydice added.
CeeCee snorted back a laugh, then answered Eurydice by broadcasting on the same wavelength. "If it's an act, he deserves an Oscar. I know he's the love of your life, Eurydice, but when it comes to women Dee doesn't have the sense God gave a lemon." The brunette rocked in Dee's arms, a muzzy smile stealing over her face as her body settled against his. "Look, the Easy girl is wide awake and having a ball with your boyfriend and he hasn't even noticed."
"Sure he has. You don't know him like I do," Eurydice broadcast before calling out in an audible frequency. "Dee, put the Easy down, please." Dee ground to a halt halfway across the road, seemed to notice the damsel draped over him for the first time. He looked about, shrugged and turned back, loping across the street in his signature jaguar strut.
"And now he's making me watch him walk," Eurydice broadcast an ultrasonic sing-song.
"Why 'make'," Unyx wondered aloud. "Why would he even want to make you…Oh." CeeCee, Eurydice, and Raspberry, their surface tension spotting with liquid goose bumps, ogled Dee's backside as he closed in on a low, even concrete slab. "Why is everyone so obsessed with ass? First Nyx with Ursula's ass, now you all with Dee's ass. Although I admit that girl in Starbucks with the great…Whoa." Dee bent over the slab. Unyx's eye-mask widened as her voice grew choppy and small. "okay — impressive." Dee stretched to lay the brunette out on the slab. "most — impressive." She shook her head, eye-mask receding. "How does he show off like that, just walking around?"
Dee nudged the brunette into a comfortable position, unheeding how she trembled and squirmed under his touch. Eurydice narrowed her eyes. "Now he's showing me his kudzu in action, trying to make me jealous." Her core achieved a steady simmer.
Raspberry edged away from the radiant green girl. "Good thing it's not working, huh?"
"I still don't buy it," CeeCee insisted, but Eurydice could hear the amber woman panting. "He can't be doing it on purpose. He just can't." Dee steamrolled toward them. "No one's that…devious."
Dee flipped the hair away from his eyes, scratching behind his ear. "What's going on, guys? CeeCee?" He cocked his head to one side "You okay?" CeeCee only nodded. Dee tapped a toe on the remaining bottle. Water spilt over the black lip print on the bottle's mouth. "Hey, is anyone going to drink that?"
Eurydice mopped her forehead. "I—I don't think so. Why?"
Dee reached for the bottle but Raspberry snatched it up and slugged some down in the blink of an eye. "Sorry," she gasped, wiping her lip with the back of her hand. "Needed one last sip. Here ya go, stud muffin. Thirsty?"
"No problem." Dee took the bottle from her. "Thanks. I'm not thirsty, just itchy. Like beach sand in the crack of your ass, but a hundred times worse."
"Dee, listen." Eurydice rose up to her knees, fidgeting.
"Just a second, honey," Dee said, and upended the bottle over his forehead. He let water pour out in three long, lazy glug noises before righting the bottle. The clear liquid ran through his hair and down his face. The neck of his white muscle shirt soaked through.
Eurydice stared as the tee shirt material stuck translucent to the toned contours of Dee's pectorals and his small chocolate brown nipples. Eurydice's legs softened and merged into a single, curvy wedge. Water droplets falling from Dee's hair dribbled onto her face. "Uh, D—Dee?"
"Oh, shit, sorry." Dee took a step back, rivulets encircling his head like a melting crown. He peeled off his shirt with his free hand, and deadpanned, "Didn't mean to get you wet." Dee turned and stalked away, pouring water down his back till it glistened.
CeeCee drew herself up, swearing, "That son of a b—" but Dee bent over to pull off his sweat pants and her lips glued themselves together. She broadcast in a burbling, babbling ultrasound: "He is. He really, really is. Please, Eurydice, let me fuck the inscrutability off that man's face. Please."
Dee stood across the road, poured more water into his hair. "That should be me," Eurydice sighed. Water ran over Dee's arms. Eurydice caressed her throat, touched the upper swell of her breast. "That should be me." Dee emptied the bottle on his legs and rubbed himself down, his muscular back flexing with each twist and stroke. "That really should be me," Eurydice groaned, her shaky hands liquefied into nectarous waves coursing down her tummy and into her sopping sex.
Raspberry coughed. "Well, tough shit, Sherlock." She slapped her hand onto the pavement. The water pooling at Dee's feet rippled. It zigzagged across the road in an army of clear pollywogs. "That was me."
"that — last — drink — you — spat — nanomek?" Unyx accused.
"Spit? Me? Never." The last of the pollywogs wiggled into her jellied fingers. "But I couldn't help a little backwash, now, could I…I…" The re-remembrances hit her and she toppled backward. "Oh fuck, he's everywhere and so solid and strong and, oh, shit, I'm cumming, I'm cumming!" She writhed in a violet puddle on the road, the fabric of Yves' shirt the only thing holding her together. "I could die, I could die now and it'd feel so good I wouldn't fucking care, I could die…"
"Good." Eurydice crept toward Raspberry on all fours, green with envy, lust, and gallons of melting gelatin. "Because I am gunna kill you."
Tomoe watched SB drag a bemused Yves down the road. Tomoe had foreseen this moment a few dozen times already, had relived this moment a few million times if she included the future. These next few days were among her very favorites, after all, and she experienced them as often as she could. "Well," she said, snapping her purse shut, "what now?"
The brunette stirred on the level concrete slab, a copper-and-silk clad offering on an altar to some Pulp Fiction carnal god.
"Oh, right." Tomoe traipsed through the minefield of broken masonry, wary of losing a shoe heel. She brushed off the top of the slab and sat by the brunette's head. "Oh, hey!" Tomoe said, making the brunette wince and blink. "Jo Echo, right?"
"How did…Do I know you?" The brunette sounded hoarse and parched.
"Nah." Tomoe shrugged one shoulder. "I've watched you before." The brunette, Jo, furrowed her brow. Tomoe thought fast. "Seen you play volleyball, I mean. You've got a great, uh, serve?"
Jo closed her eyes, groaning, "Whatever."
"What do you remember? How are you feeling?"
"Little," Jo said, shading her eyes. "Terrible. I keep trying to sleep, but my heart is pounding, my head is pounding, but worst of all my…" She blushed, mumbling, "Sore. Really sore. What did I do last night? Who did I do?" Her blush burned fire-engine red. "And why do I want to do it all over again? Christ, why am I telling this to you? Listen, lady, you got any aspirin?"
Tomoe shook her head. "No aspirin, sorry. Sleepy?" Jo gave Tomoe a curt nod, grating her head on the concrete. Tomoe popped open her purse and presented Jo with a SRU-labeled, trial-size pill bottle. "I've got some Endymizine, though. Just one pill and you sleep so good you never want to wake up." She shook the bottle, making it rattle. "Two pills and…Oh, you want some? For you? Five dollar." Tomoe's dark eyes glittered above an unreadable smile.
"Um." Jo patted down her coppery one-piece dress. "This thing doesn't have any pockets. I don't have any money."
Tomoe stared. She dropped the SRU bottle back into her purse. A blue and white plastic bottle clicked onto the concrete beside Jo's ear. "Here. Have some ibuprofen." She stiffened. "Free of charge."
Jo propped herself up. "But…"
"Forget it!" Tomoe threw her hands in the air as she marched away, not looking back. "You ruined it."
The ivy-choked kitchen window of the Epsilon Zeta sorority house slivered the early-afternoon sun. Lancets of light tracked over the checker-tiled floor. Shimmering ovals glanced off the brushed aluminum of the industrial-sized refrigerator. A sickle-smile spotlight warmed the residue of cheesecake pudding and raspberry gelatin caked on the cock of the husky stock boy hogtied to the marble-topped kitchen cart. He shuffled his legs but his skewed smock got in the way, the underwear and workpants bunched around his knees restricted movement. The sugary gunk soaked into his pubic hair, trickled down his balls and greased his taint. He had never felt more befouled in his life.
So why the Hell was his dick pointing straight at the ceiling?
The swinging kitchen door bumped open. A cute girl in a tight, white spandex tee-shirt and pink hot pants stood in the frame. "Relax," she said, "she's not back yet. Something's happened to her."
None of the Easies had talked to him before except to relay messages. Messages from her. "What do you mean?"
The cute girl scuttled over. The stock boy cringed but she only stepped behind him, wrestling with the twine binding his hands to the kitchen cart. She smelled like a gym locker. "What's your name, kid?"
None of the Easies had acted this alert before, either. A little hope bubbled up. "Eddie. What's going on?"
"We don't know," the Easy girl said, tried to unknot the twine without cutting into his wrists. "But she's real low on nova-whatsis. Whatever it is she uses to control us. Do you know what that is, Eddie?"
His eyes flicked to the closed tin of SRU thickener, half-hidden on the kitchen counter in a cluster of torn Jell-O boxes. "Not exactly. So, are you guys okay? Free, whatever?"
"Not exactly," she echoed. "I still can't leave the house. I don't think any of us can. It feels like my feet get glued to the floor. And I can still hear her, sort of, like really loud music but from next door, you know? It's been like this for a while now."
"Really? Why hasn't anyone come in here, then? It's been hours. Aren't you guys hungry?"
The cute girl paused. "Starved." She went back to work, pulling one knot lose. "Listen, I'm real sorry no one's come to get you yet." She grinned. "But we've got you now, Eddie."
Eddie felt a little chill. "I heard the doorbell ring. Around 10:30? Were you free then? What was that about?"
The door bumped open again and another Easy marched in, licking her fingers. This one wore red leather pants and a black, tasseled jacket. Her thick mane of strawberry-blonde curls exploded out of a FedEx cap perched atop her head.
"Dunno," said the girl in the pink hot pants. A second knot came undone. "Must've been a wrong number." She stretched to stage whisper at the other girl, the front of her tee shirt bussing the top of Eddie's head. "This is Eddie."
"O-kay," Eddie drawled. Something was up. Other than his dick. Oh, Jesus, his dick. "Um, would you mind pulling up my pants?" He blushed. "Or just moving the smock? Something?"
The girl in the FedEx hat popped a finger out of her mouth. "Now, why would we want to do that?" She sashayed over and sat on Eddie's knees. He could hear the scrunch of her leather pants. She wore no shirt under the jacket, just a racy, red, lacy bra. Tips of black felt gloves poked out from a jacket pocket. "What'cha got there, Eddie?" She twirled her slick finger around his pubic hair and slid a dollop of runny glop between her lips. "Well, phooey. Nothing but goo girl cum. We've eaten plenty of that. We're looking for something else."
Eddie tried to shy away, but with Hot Pants pushing her tits on his head and FedEx squeezing his legs between her leather-wrapped thighs, there was nowhere to go. There's a certain freedom, Eddie decided, in being totally screwed. "I thought you said she didn't control you any more."
Hot Pants sat behind him and untied the rest of the twine. "She doesn't." His hands fell to the floor, painfully numb. Her hands crept underneath his leaden arms. "She can't tell us what to do, not exactly, until she gets more nova-whatsis. So we've been talking. All of us. And as far as we know, there's just one source." Her fingers wrapped around his honey-basted cock and her lips pressed to his ear. "And that's you, Eddie."
FedEx settled her butt onto his knees, reached into her jacket, and pulled one red bra strap down her shoulder. "We like being free, Eddie." She grabbed one of his hands and brought it to her breast, encouraging his fingers to paw beneath the loose lingerie. Her flesh felt warm and silken. Eddie had not felt a girl up since high school. How could he resist? "Mm, although I don't think we're really free. We still share her instincts, impulses." She cupped his chin. "Appetites."
Hot Pants' hands around his goo-girl lubricated dick began to pump, slow and lazy. Eddie felt the delicious sting of precum. "Well, whatever we are, we really…" Pump-up-and-squeeze "Really…" Pump-down-and-swirl "Like it."
Eddie came in spurts, not even fully erect. The precum sting just got sweeter and sweeter until his cock wept globs of cum. Hot Pants held his dick, squeezing and kneading. FedEx sat on his knees, leering like the Chesire Cat, watching his cum ooze onto the other girl's knuckles. She reached into her jacket pocket and snuck out the gloves. They slid onto her hands with a silky sigh.
His dick softened a bit. Hot Pants stroked up and squeezed, making his whole body twitch. FedEx reached down, and now there were four hands, two bare, two wrapped in cool black felt, kneading his cock into tingling over-stimulation. The gloved fingers were super-smooth when they glided down, became bristles against his cock when they wiggled up. The bare fingers were hot and slippy. In the shock of afterglow, his dick hardened like ironwood. "Wa—wait."
The two girls glanced at each other over Eddie's head. "Nah," they chorused, and returned to pumping. Eddie's jism and the glistening goo girl cum were worked into froth by the action of the fabric and fingers against his skin.
Eddie arched his back and kicked but the combined weight of the two girls was just too much after being bound and bent over for hours. "Wait!" Each squeeze and curl of their fingers made him jolt and judder.
"We're tired of waiting, Eddie," FedEx whined, sliming his dick with his own cum. "We want to be free. We need to be free. So we're gunna drain you bone dry and make sure you stay that way."
"Besides," Hot Pants whispered into his ear. Their pumping grew fervid and quick. The froth worked itself into the fabric of the gloves. The two girls fisted him, harder and faster. "Want to know what her last command was before she let us go?"
Eddie could only whimper, awful afterglow orgasm building.
The kitchen door flung open. A wild-eyed, half naked man wearing nothing but a ragged, FedEx uniform shirt fell into the room. Many slender hands shot out of the doorway behind him, grabbing up his bare ankles, calves, thighs and ass. His eyes met Eddie's. He gurgled, "Run," before he was hauled back through the door and out of sight.
The girl wearing the FedEx hat giggled, scooted down and bent close, watching captivated as she and Hot Pants beat Eddie off to a searing, second orgasm. Little pearls of cum splattered her chin. They kept working him over until his cum ran clear and thin as water before they let go. The coil burning in Eddie's balls and abdomen unwound at last.
Then FedEx ran froth-matted, gloved fingers over her lips, cooed, "Frenzy," and deep-throated him.
Eurydice loomed over the convulsing Raspberry. Green honey drizzled down Eurydice's chin onto the lavender girl's tummy. Raspberry's bellybutton ranneth over and a steaming emerald flood washed down the delta of her sex. Raspberry squealed, toes wriggling. She held up a trembling hand. "Wait, wait. Eurydice, wait!"
Eurydice frowned down. "What?"
Raspberry's eyes rolled back. A few wayward pollywogs found her, swam into her, fed her their memories. Raspberry's hand dropped down to her labia, sleek with green and purple nectar. "I finally got Dee by the balls." She gulped. "Holy shit, they're ginormous and so full. Jeebus, there's no way you could ever fuck all this cum out of him yourself, Eurydice. Share the wealth, ya greedy twat."
Eurydice boggled, unbelieving, before grinning a mouthful of knives. She swung about, locked her legs over Raspberry's head. "Oh, I'll show you a greedy twat alright." Eurydice's face hovered over Raspbery's cleft. Her breath melted the jellied orchid petals covering the lavender girl's mons into a slurry of raspberry wine. Eurydice's dreadlocks wound tight around Raspberry's thighs. "But first I feel like making some soup." She mashed her face and sex down. Green and purple slithered together in a pneumatic 69.
"Well, that's one way to make a raspberry lime rickey," CeeCee said.
"So, Eurydice." Dee trotted over, skin glistening wet. "What did you wa–ha–huh?" Raspberry wrapped her arms around Eurydice's waist, tongue stabbing deep. "Uh, guys? Hey, guys?"
Eurydice threw her head back, gasping. Her teeth flashed with pomegranate nectar. "You made her cum first, bright boy. So fair's fair. And when I'm through with her." Eurydice spread Raspberry's sex between two fingers and kissed the lavender, clitoral hood into her mouth. "You're next."
"CeeCee," Dee said, stepping over to the kneeling amber woman so that his bare crotch was level with her face, his dick slowly engorging, making her cockeyed. "What's up?"
CeeCee's lips squirmed, her jaw trembled. She shook her head, hissing, "You God damned, teasing motherfu—" She cut herself short, held up both hands. The air wooshed out of her. She took a cleansing breath, then looked up at Dee, canary diamond eyes cool and sparkling. "Face it, honey. You've been upstaged. Topping those two tarts is going to take some teamwork. And nanomek."
"Dee." Unyx paced. "no – games – need – nanomek – you're – friends. " She wrung her hands. "you – Ursula – good – friends – much – trust – but – can't – we – can't. " Her eye-mask dwindled until only black contacts remained. "Dee," Unyx mumbled, "what are we going to do?"
Dee brushed a tear away from Unyx's cheek, staining his thumb with black ink. "I'll do what I have to do." He looked down at his hands, then his crotch, and shrugged. "Got a bucket?"
CeeCee and Eurydice both cried, "What?" while Raspberry, smothered in limeade pussy, only managed a "Wff?"
Eurydice sat up. "Oh, no." Her juicy green ass pivoted over Raspberry's face, slicker than a quart of astroglide. Raspberry groaned in depraved delight, her arms falling limp as she just lay there, wallowing in the face-fucking. "No, way." Eurydice's gel-flesh tits and tummy separated from Raspberry's surface in a syrupy, slurping wave. She wore a thick, vertical candy stripe of berry-red frosting from her chin to her belly. "If you think we're going to just sit here," Eurydice muttered, rocking, "and watch you play with that glorious cock of Mine while you fill a fucking, mm, b–bucket, with all that, oh, God, all that c–cum…"
CeeCee's poker face broke into desperation. She rolled up onto her feet, a fountain of creamy yellow sherbet. "You could really fill a bucket?"
Raspberry squeezed her head out from between the green girl's ass-cheeks. She wore an avocado facial mask of lime goo girl cum. "Shit on a stick, CeeCee," Raspberry burbled. "Wait till ya feel what that man's got to offer, we're gunna need a fucking bucket brigade."
"Shut up, you two," Eurydice demanded, rising, her eyes glowing, her head so wreathed in vapor she seemed aflame in jade. "Dee, if you think you can tease us like that." She advanced on Dee, fuming. "In fact, if you keep teasing us just one more second, you've got another thing cumming." The sheaves of her quivering hair tickled his chin. "Got that?"
The sultry vapor enveloped him, its citrus-and-sex aroma stronger than he ever remembered. "Um." Dee grew hard in seconds. "Uh-oh."
Eurydice bent her head, eyes rolling down. "Alright. That's it." She stepped aside. "Girls, it's time."
Dee backpedaled, arms raised. "But…"
Raspberry rocketed upright, her borrowed overshirt saturated with psychedelic purple and green hues. "Sweeeet." She swaggered over and grabbed Dee's left elbow.
Dee protested, "I didn't…"
"I'll try anything once," CeeCee said, surging forward and grabbing Dee's right wrist. "Twice if I like it." She glanced down at his thick prick. "Three times to make sure."
"But it wasn't on purpose," Dee insisted. "It wasn't my fault."
"No," Eurydice said, stepping behind him, planting her hands on his back. "It was Mine. Now march. God, Dee, even your back is rock hard. This is gunna be the best fuck you've ever had."
The three girls pushed and pulled him forward. Ursula dropped back, inky contacts spilling out into the whites of her eyes, then spreading over her face in a raccoon's mask. "guys – wait – Dee – looks – scared."
Eurydice relented, grinning in reverie. "It's bestest when he looks scared." The three meliae lead him off road. "And he's loving it. C'mon, Unyx. You don't want to miss this."
Unyx pussyfooted after them. "Eurydice – nanomek – need – so – much – but – how – um – what – are – you – doing?"
"What I do best," Eurydice said, pushing Dee past the copse of fallen trees and into the fallow field of wild grass beyond. "I'm going to fuck Dee." She stood on tiptoe to leer over Dee's shoulder at CeeCee and Raspberry. "We're going to fuck Dee." She glanced back, purring, "and then we're going to fuck the ever living shit out of you."
SB led Yves round the bend. The road turned treacherous under Yves' unsure feet. "Easy," SB said, turning about to steady him, her hand finding its way behind his neck. "What's your last name, Yves?" Her tone was calm and casual. Her fingers soothed the aching tendons in his nape.
"Valiancourt." Yves found his balance.
SB kept rubbing. "Quebecois?"
"My father, yes." Yves' eyelids fluttered. "Mom's Minnesotan."
"Swedish." SB's other hand joined the first, thumbs massaging beneath Yves' ears. "Götalander."
"Yeah. That was my grandmother's name: Göta." Yves peeked. "How did you know?"
"Dunno." SB's eyes roved over Yves' spiky blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and tall, whipcord frame. "Lucky guess."
The pressure-point massage felt almost too delicious. He mumbled, "Strong."
SB rubbed Yves' neck for a while before asking, in the same conversational tone as her other questions, "Have you ever hit on Dee?"
"Yeah," Yves chuckled, eyes closed. "Once. He didn't notice." He snapped awake. "Oh-shit."
SB draped her arms down onto Yves' shoulders, lips pursed. "Was that supposed to be secret?"
"Not exactly. I mean, I even told Dee later." He glowered. "Just don't tell Ursula. Unyx. Whoever she is, I'd never hear the end of it."
"So you're attracted to him?"
"No. Well, then, yes, obviously. But that was when he first moved in and no one could figure him out." Yves shrugged. "After I knew he was straight, I wasn't interested. If it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen."
"Just like that, huh?" SB toyed with the tag on Yves' tee shirt. "You intellectualize that much?"
"It's not like that. I'm an existential monogamist."
SB cocked her head. "What the heck does that mean?"
Yves sighed, gearing up for a lecture. "Sex is just something that happens between two people." SB looked at him, puzzled. He opened his mouth to explain.
She kissed him. Her kiss was soft, lips plush but only slightly parted. The darting tip of her tongue touched his, salty sweet and tart, a sumptuous slice of strawberry gently placed in his mouth. She stepped back, hands on hips. "Well. Did something happen?"
Yves rolled the lingering mix of flavors around in his mouth with his tongue. "You mean you couldn't tell?" He glanced down, watching SB's dress inch up. "The hem of your dress gives you away. Nice knees."
SB smirked and held up the mason jar. "What is that stuff, anyway?" Yves asked. "And please don't tell me where you were keeping it."
"It's for you." The jelly sloshed in the jar.
"I don't need to change, and I don't have five dollars."
"True, true. But this won't change you one bit. And anyway, it's not for sale. It's mine to give. And I give it to you." She stood there, tapping the jar against her chin.
"All right, then." Magical thinking, Yves reminded himself. Fairy tale logic. "I trust you and accept your gift." SB only tapped the jar. Yves asked, "So what do we do now?"
"We get the fuck out of here." SB's smile broadened. "Can you drive stick?"
"Cute."
"Cute, huh?" SB squat on her haunches, palms flat against the road, and arched a brow at him. "Vroom, vroom." She slid her legs out and back. Her gel-flesh moiled, shone, and reshaped.
Yves stared. "That's, uh…" SB's engine growled to life. Yves felt road rumble through the rubber soles of his sneakers. "That's, uh, definitely not a Mini Cooper."
The rose red racer was low-slung and all hood, its bulging, round headlights and outthrust grill unmistakable. "The Coop's Tomoe's car," said the roofless Aston Martin supercar, its voice drifting up from the gearbox. "This is mine."
Yves circled the speedster, running his hand over the swells above the rear tires, expecting the give of camouflaged gel-flesh, but finding cold, polished, hard alloy. The engine noise dropped to a purr. "Late Fifties?" Yves guessed. "Mark III?"
"Please." The SB-gearbox voice managed to sound sardonic. "Mark III's are for James Bond wannabe pussies. I'm a D-B-fucking-3. Placed at les 24 Heures du Mans, thank you very fuckin' much." Yves completed his second circuit around the car, and the gearbox added, "So are you going to get in and drive me or am I going to have to start making Hasselhoff jokes?"
Yves slid into the driver's seat, not bothering to open the door of the roofless speedster. Everything inside the cabin was