by Megan Hart
Kelsey yawned, the back of her hand covering her mouth. “Dennis, I’m so tired. Where can I get some sleep?”
“You can use my bed.”
“It’s not big enough,” she told him flatly, no hint of flirtation, not even a ghost of a smile.
He paused. “Mom’s bed’s a queen.”
Upstairs in his mother’s room, Dennis carefully pulled down the covers with his good hand and waved her into the bed. Kelsey took off the borrowed jeans and shirt, leaving her in a tank top and boxers. She settled on the edge, staring at him until he looked away. She didn’t lay back.
“I don’t want to sleep alone,” she told him.
“Someone should…watch.”
Kelsey didn’t let this deter her. With a lift of her chin, she inched back and patted the mattress beside her. “You’re exhausted too. Come to bed with me.”
He shifted from foot to foot, still not looking at her. “Kelsey…”
“Dennis,” she said sharply. “I need you.”
Without another word, she scooted to the other edge of the bed and turned onto her side facing away from him. She waited, eyes closed, heart beating fast, for him to leave the room. After a long minute though, the mattress dipped. She felt his warmth behind her, though he wasn’t even close to touching her. She heard him breathing.
Kelsey knew men. She knew how they walked and talked and most of the time, how they thought. She knew them because she’d gone about the study of them as intensely and with as much effort as she’d put into her schoolwork. What men liked. What they wanted. She’d shaped her body, colored her hair and whitened her teeth to make herself as pleasing to them as she could, because men were very often the key to getting what she wanted.
What she wanted now, no…needed, now, was for Dennis to hold her.
When he didn’t move toward her, she shifted, inching backward. Reaching behind her, she took his arm, slipped it around her to tuck his hand against her belly just below her breasts. She held it there with hers. With still an inch or so of space between them, the position wasn’t as comfortable as she wanted. She moved closer.
At his sharp intake of breath, she paused. His breath caressed the back of her neck. More heat rose. His fingers twitched against her.
Kelsey shifted again. Slowly, slowly. She pressed her butt against his crotch, wiggling just a little to get comfortable.
Dennis sighed.
Tears pricked her eyes, so she closed them. Her breathing slowed. He didn’t move. She wriggled just a little closer, waiting.
When he made no move to slide his hand up to cup her breast, or to push himself against her — and he was hard, she could feel that with no trouble, when he made no effort at trying to make this simple embrace into something more, Kelsey pressed her free hand to her eyes to hold back the sting of tears.
“Dennis,” she breathed in a voice low and hoarse, sort of shameful in its need. “Please touch me.”
He shuddered, actually shook. Like he was disgusted. He made like he meant to pull away, but when she tightened her fingers in his, he stilled.
Without looking at him, Kelsey slid their joined hands down the flat stomach she’d worked so many hours to make taut and tight. How hard she’d struggled. The meals she’d missed, the surgeries. Now her hip bones jutted, her stomach concave. She could laugh. All it took was the end of the world to make her model-skinny, and here she was with a man who didn’t seem inclined to want her.
She pushed Dennis’s fingers beneath the edge of her borrowed boxers to cup her. The low noise he made in his throat encouraged her to curl his fingertips against her. Just…there.
Slow, slow, slow. She guided his fingertip in tiny, steady circles. She waited for him to move on his own, to go too fast, get too eager, to try and slide inside her from behind…but Dennis only did what Kelsey wanted him to do.
It went on and on, the pleasure rising incrementally, second by second, until she couldn’t stop herself from moving against him. Arching, Kelsey rolled her hips. He was so hard against her, but he didn’t even try to get inside her, it was driving her crazy and yet she couldn’t make herself shift or open for him. All she could do was keep his fingers moving on her.
She whispered his name, turning her face to give him her mouth. Dennis didn’t kiss her. She let go of his hand to slide her arm up and around the back of his head. If his hand had stopped moving between her legs, she’d have screamed — but it didn’t. He’d found her rhythm. Just right.
Just…there.
Oh, how long it had been since she’d felt anything but fear or pain or utter exhaustion. It made this pleasure all the sweeter. It rocked her. It turned her inside out. In fact, she wept with it, or maybe there were other reasons for the tears, but whatever it was, she tasted salt when she came.
Long, silent seconds later, she went still. Dennis breathed against her neck, his hand still tucked between her legs. Kelsey blinked and wiped her face, not sure of what to say.
When it became clear Dennis wasn’t going to speak, she rolled to face him, her thigh nudging between his. She thought about reaching between them to touch him, but something in his eyes kept her from it. Instead, she cupped his face.
“Dennis?”
Dennis settled a little into the pillow.
“Thank you.”
He looked uncomfortable. “You don’t have to thank me.”
She pushed her thigh a little higher. “Don’t you want…me?”
Kelsey had thought she was a pretty good judge of when to be coy, when to flutter her lashes and dip her chin to make a man feel like he was in charge. She knew when to be aggressive, too. The perfect mix of madonna and whore. She had no idea how to deal with a man who seemed bent on resisting her.
Dennis didn’t move, though he sure looked like he wanted to. He swallowed hard, his gaze shifting from hers. He closed his eyes after a second, as though the sight of her was too much. “Yes. No. I mean…you don’t have to do this.”
“I want to,” she told him and got up on one elbow to look into his face. “Dennis. Look at me.”
He did after a second, though clearly with reluctance. Kelsey moved away to give him some space. She frowned, trying to understand him and still unable.
“I want you,” she said simply. “I want to do this with you. I don’t know how to be more blunt except to say Dennis, please fuck me.”
He snorted, his body jerking, and sat up. He twisted away from her. The movement was so swift, so sharp, she didn’t have time to react until he’d completely given her his back.
“What did I do?” She cried.
“It’s not you.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, careful not to squeeze too hard. “Then…what?”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’ve never…I mean…it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I don’t know how.”
She laughed; it was the wrong thing to do of course. Men never took kindly to laughter when it came to bedroom matters. But she couldn’t help it. “Oh, Dennis, you definitely know how.”
She’d been with men who’d have slapped her for that laughter, but Dennis’s mouth quirked up on one side. “No.”
She nodded, taking a chance on moving a little closer. “Oh. Yes.”
He ducked his head, not looking at her again. His shoulders hunched. “You probably think I’m the biggest asshole alive.”
“Because you’ve never slept with someone?” Truthfully, she found it surprising and endearing and charming and adorable.
He nodded.
She scooted to sit next to him, a scant inch of space between them so it wouldn’t seem overwhelming to him. She let her heels tap against the bed as she studied her hands on her lap. “You are not an asshole, Dennis. Not even close.”
“I just never met anyone, I mean I met people, women, I mean. But never anyone I wanted to, well. Or that wanted to with me, I guess.”
She found that hard to believe.
Dennis shrugged. “And then the lon
ger it went on, the more ridiculous it seemed to have to tell someone, I mean, how do you do that?”
“You just told me,” she pointed out. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
He slanted her a sideways look. “It was pretty bad.”
She laughed again, softer this time. She took a chance and reached for his hand, and when he let her take it, she lifted it to her mouth and brushed a kiss over the knuckles. “Everyone has a first time. I’d be very —”
But before she could finish what she meant to say, the house started screaming.
50
Crazy people heard voices in their heads. Maddy had always thought it would be kind of cool to have someone talking to her from inside her skull, like her own private radio show or something — it wouldn’t be as cool as being able to talk inside someone else’s head, but pretty neat anyway. Telepathy was when you could hear someone’s thoughts. She’d learned that from watching scary movies. But that wasn’t what crazy people had. They just had craziness.
In her bed, looking into the dark with her hands folded on top of her belly, Maddy listened to the whispering inside her head. Not voices. Not words. Yet something was going on inside her. Something tried to get her to do what it wanted. She laughed at that a little, softly so nobody could hear.
Nobody made Maddy do anything she didn’t want to do.
The whispering was like a shush-shush and that was okay. The itching wasn’t. It had started in her lungs, making her cough so much Mom had actually tried to get Maddy to take some medicine. She’d put her hand on Maddy’s forehead, searching for fever, like she was worried. Maddy knew better. Mom only worried when her “water” bottle was empty.
Anyway, Maddy wasn’t sick. It was those wiggly things from that egg that made her cough, and that went away after a day or so. Her throat tickled next so that she was always thirsty, but no matter how much she drank she couldn’t seem to wash away the itch. That or the taste and smell of those flowers. Not even sticking her finger down the back of her throat helped, though she studied her puke really carefully to see if there were any of those black wiggly things inside it.
The day after that, everything seemed brighter. Colors. Shadows. She could count the lines at the corners of her mom’s eyes from all the way across the room. Maddy could smell things, too. Perfume, sweat, soap. She could tell that Mrs. Baxter and Mr. Rivel had been getting up to some things they shouldn’t in one of the janitor closets, because they both smelled like spit and bleach and sort of like microwave burritos.
And now her brains itched. Wiggly threads, little tadpoles, swimming in the meat of her brain. In and out, along all the curves. What were they doing?
Brains weren’t supposed to be able to feel anything, that’s how come you could stick a needle into someone’s eye socket and scramble them up to make them less crazy. You could do it with a knitting needle. That was called a lobotomy. She’d learned that on the internet.
She put her fingers to her eyeballs and pressed hard enough to make the colors dance, but not quite hard enough to hurt. The whispering stopped. So did the itching.
What are you?
No answer, which frustrated her. She tried again, thinking harder this time.
What do you want?
Still nothing. Maddy stopped pressing her eyes and put her hands back on her belly, fingers linked. She blinked away the red haze and stared again into the darkness. She was hungry. She wanted ice cream, but they only kind they had was freeze-dried in pouches. Astronaut ice cream. It was shitty, that’s what she’d heard her dad say to her mom when he thought nobody could hear them, but they had boxes and boxes of it in one of the store rooms. It was meant to be sold in museums and amusement parks, not for people to survive on, that’s what her mom had said. They were lucky enough to have food, water, power and shelter. They didn’t need ice cream, too.
That’s why Mom was dumb.
The itching came back. With a frown, Maddy pictured a fist, squeezing her brain. Smooshing the wigglies. The itching stopped.
What are you? What do you want?
No answer. It occurred to her that whatever was inside was either refusing to answer, or incapable of it. This was interesting. Tadpoles didn’t talk, she knew that. But something in these things made people go crazy, something made the whispers.
Maybe she was trying too hard to keep them from doing what they were meant to do.
In science class, Maddy had done a report on a type of zombie ant. A parasitic — that meant something that lived off something else — fungus got in the ants brains and made them kill themselves so the fungus could release its infectious spores and make more zombie ants. Her teacher had said Maddy’s research was “exemplary” but that the pictures she’d drawn of dead ants was a little too graphic for class. She got an A, though. Maddy almost always did.
Was that what had happened to all those people? Was it some sort of parasite in a fungus? Or maybe it was more like that movie she’d seen up late one night in her best friend Emma’s house, after her parents had gone to bed. In that one, aliens had come from outer-space and attached themselves to people, on their backs. They rode them like horses, sort of, except the aliens were tiny, easily hidden underneath clothes so nobody could know if a person was normal or had a puppet master on its back.
Slowly, slowly, Maddy let her imaginary fist loosen. She hated puppets, always had. You couldn’t make them do much of anything really fun — soft puppets always looked stupid, and she’d never been able to make a marionette work. The strings tangled. She couldn’t even make them dance. People were so much more fun to work.
The tickling and itching returned, spreading now down her spine. It didn’t feel so much like tadpoles now. She thought of the flowers, vines and tendrils unfurling. Spreading. Tiny threads inching along her nerves.
Something like electricity crackled inside her, not quite the way it was if you rubbed your stocking feet on a carpet and touched a doorknob, but close. Maddy stretched her arms wide. Her legs. Her back arched. Her toes curled.
Oh, this felt goooooood.
51
“Shit.” Dennis pulled away from Kelsey at the sound of the shrieking alarm. He’d heard it only a few times before, when mom was testing it — this alarm was meant to frighten off intruders who’d been clever enough to bypass at least some of the preliminary defenses. That or disarm them by making them deaf. He’d thought it was a stupid idea when she’d told him about it, compared to the much better system she’d had in place, but by the time she installed this one, he’d been on his way to moving out.
“What is it?”
He looked at her. “Something got at the camera outside.”
She was right behind him when he checked the monitors. Sure enough, dark. All of them. Even the ones set high in the eaves and the few placed around the back of the property.
“Not just the camera, but the wires. They’re all cut.”
Kelsey made a low noise and tapped one of the blank screens before looking at him. “It would have to be smart to cut the wires. Wouldn’t it?”
He thought so, but wasn’t sure. “Could be a fluke.”
She snorted soft laughter. “C’mon. Your mom seems to have a pretty good system in place. You think something simple could do this? Has to be deliberate, huh?”
She was so smart it made his head hurt. So beautiful it made his heart ache. Dennis nodded after a second, listening to the screaming alarms, muffled in the house but deafening outside.
“He did it. Your dad,” she offered. “Your father, rather. I guess he’s not really your dad.”
“He had to. I don’t know how he’d have known about it though.”
“If he knew your mom, he might’ve guessed.”
“But he’s dead,” Dennis said suddenly, with bite. He ran a hand over his hair, digging his fingers into his scalp. “Days dead, by the looks of it. What the hell is going on?”
Kelsey put her hands on his shoulders, turning him until he looked her in the eye
. “Maybe not all of them are stupid. I mean…he was probably pretty smart when he was alive, right? Top secret clearance and all that.”
“You don’t have to be smart to get top secret clearance.” Dennis laughed.
“Still.” Her grin made heat sizzle all through him. “I bet he was. So maybe if he was that super brainy before he died, some of it stuck around after he died.”
“I wish we knew what was going on. That’s all. Not with the alarm, that I can figure out. But all of this.” Dennis shook his head.
“It’s fucked up, that’s for sure,” she said solemnly, “but you know what I think?”
He studied her, curious. “What?”
“I think it doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter,” Dennis asked, “when the world’s gone to shit?”
Kelsey shrugged, then took his hand. She smiled at him. “Not all of it.”
52
“Maddy. Pay attention,” Dad said. “This is important.”
Math problems weren’t important anymore. History, not important. Grammar, ridiculous. Maddy stared at the pile of books he’d put out in front of her. Busy work, that’s what it was. Something to make the grownups feel like they were doing something impressive by keeping the kids in line with word problems and spelling tests.
“Why?”
Dad licked at a bead of sweat on his upper lip. The complex was part of a storage facility that had been built in a mine. Everything was underground, the temperature never changing except when it was artificially altered. That’s why it made such a great place to store stuff, Dad had told her early on, because everything could be climate controlled. They heated the living spaces of the complex to make it more comfortable for them, so it wasn’t like living in a cave, but that wouldn’t explain why Dad would be sweating.
