by David Coy
* * *
The physical modification, as horrible as it was, had made Gilbert very sexually active. That could work to Bailey’s advantage, as she saw it.
She wanted him in the right frame of mind when she did her witchcraft.
She’d once had a boyfriend, an attractive older man, whom she’d liked very much and who was very verbal during sex. He’d taught her that saying it and doing it were two sides of the same coin; and if you understood that, you could add some exotic spice to the act of lovemaking. Sometimes, much more than just spice.
Her early attempts at verbal lovemaking weren’t very inspired. She was only seventeen at the time, and it hadn’t been easy for her to get into it at first. But under his artful tutelage, expletives like, “Fuck me! Lick me! Oh, fuck me!” were stretched and molded like warm taffy into long, lascivious commentary, hissed or whispered thickly into her lover’s ear.
Most men she’d known since, including her husband Jim, were stiff, silent lovers, barely issuing a grunt, let alone dripping the sexually lubricating poetry she was capable of.
Jim had found her gift fascinating and amusing but had a puritanical streak she’d never quite broken down, so she hadn’t had much face-to-face practice since she’d been with that older man. Still, she hoped she wouldn’t be too distracted by Gilbert’s physical presence. She would have to have all of her senses present so there would be no escaping the tactile horror of the mushy, fabricated body or avoiding the concentrated disgust his groping sired. After thinking it through, she decided she could stoke it to the required sexual temperature under the circumstances in spite of having him right there physically.
She waited until he was on top of her before she began.
It started simply enough, just a verbal mirroring of the physical act itself. From there she slowly embellished, tuned and polished it until his physical pawing and pumping began to take on shadings of the erotic surreal in his mind. The claws sank deep in his libido, pulling him by the nipples, down the tunnel of her choosing. She alternately jerked then caressed him along, laughing through wet, full lips at his fawning desire, making the words wetter with each throaty chuckle delivered slowly or by some dirty secret gushed quickly into his mouth or ear.
At the end of the steaming tunnel lay the voluptuous demon of her fantasy—the exact manifestation of her purpose and the chosen form of her fantastic succubus. Lying there wet and oiled smooth in the sexual slick of her illusion, it turned its corpulent form toward them, rolling, sprawling sensually, squirming hungrily to feed and suckle. Her claws sank deeper. She pulled him to it teasingly, sensually and with her mouth open wide and her tongue wagging naughtily, she fed him to the demon’s wet desire with a final lick of her long, pointed tongue.
“Yesssss . . . .yessssss . . . .” he said and came and slumped as if the very life had been sucked out of him.
He had, of course, no way of knowing that Bailey Hall, for the last four years, or slightly more, had made a good living by providing phone sex to a very appreciative and growing clientele. It had been Jim’s idea to start the business.
Later, pretending to sketch idly, she produced a carefully detailed drawing in three views of the phantasm she’d conjured and put it playfully under Gilbert’s nose. His mouth drew into a line for just a second, and he looked at it for a long time. When she looked at his thin dick, it was standing straight up.
And so her plan was laid. She would become the phantasm. The aliens would change her into it because twisted Gilbert wanted it so. The madness of it made her giggle, and she leaned over and, with the insane smile yet on her pursed lips, air-kissed Gilbert’s slack face from a foot away.
* * *
Ned wasn’t well. He was sallow and pale and sweating profusely, all bad signs.
The grubs created short channels that filled with blood, interstitial fluid and their own waste—a perfect medium for bacteria. The bacteria, in turn, would create metabolites and other toxins that could poison within hours. The aliens were careful to clean those channels and seal them well, apparently aware of the potential of infection from such fetid pockets. Phil had assumed that the fluid the aliens pumped into them during surgery contained some short-term antibiotic to counteract the potential of infection. Short term, because they were still susceptible to infection between surgeries. Proof of that had been provided by the death of Tom Moon.
Ned had every sign of having an infection from a not-so-clean channel; perhaps his surgeon had become careless. Phil conveyed his fears to Mary. She had a slightly different diagnosis.
“What is it then?” Phil asked.
“They’ve left a worm inside him.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen it before.”
“Does he know it’s there?”
“Probably. If he doesn’t, he will. The goddamn thing’ll be trying to bore out soon.”
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”
They were losing time, and his band of rebels had been struck a blow before they ever started. With Ned sick, or dead, they wouldn’t have enough soldiers to launch an attack.
They’d have to wait and hope Ned recovered. If he didn’t, they’d have lost before they began.
“We have to do something for him,” Phil said.
“What? What are we supposed to do?”
“You’ve got some little tools don’t you? Little probes and awls and such?”
“They’re not tools. I made them out of goddamn coat hangers. They’re doodles—little nothings. I know what you need.”
Mary pounded back to the hole. Phil stepped over and looked in at Ned. He was lying on his side, facing away from the opening. Completely motionless, he could already have died.
“How are you feeling, buddy?” Phil said in the slightly loud voice reserved for the sick.
Ned turned his head and eyes toward Phil, but couldn’t quite make contact.
“Not so good,” he said. “I’m really sick.”
He paused and let his head come back to rest on his arm. “Is it what I think it is?”
There was no sense trying to hide the truth. Like Mary said, he’d know soon enough. Phil climbed up into the hole and knelt down beside him. “Mary thinks it’s a worm,” he said gently. “But we don’t know for sure.”
Ned coughed and pulled up his shirt exposing his huge side. Moving slowly, his fingers felt a slightly inflamed area over a recent scar. His voice was low and measured.
“That’s it right there. That’s where it is. When I feel it, I can feel the sonofabitch move. He’s not very deep. You gonna dig it out?”
“Are you up to it?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. What the hell’s one more, eh?”
“We don’t have the right tools. It’ll be even rougher than what you’re used to.”
Ned thought about it and tried to smile. “If you can handle it, I can handle it,” he said.
Mary called Phil out of the chamber with a quiet summons. She dropped the four little tools into his hand then held up what Phil thought at first was a small piece of paper.
“I found this in a shaving kit in the dump a long time ago,” she said. “There was only one. I was saving it for myself, you know, to do this very thing if I had to—or something.”
It was a double-edged razor blade, wrapped in translucent paper. Phil hadn’t seen one like it in years. He had a sudden vision of the dop kit it must have come from, an old, worn, fold-open type, with a cracked plastic liner, the property of an old and frugal gentleman. Darrel Dwight probably had one like it. He lifted the edge of the wrapper and was greeted with a glint of light off an edge of infinite sharpness.
“And there’s this,” she said and held up a little plastic sewing kit with lengths of thread of various colors, as well as several needles. “You can sew him up with some of this.”
“Go down to the clothes dump and get something clean to use for bandages,” he said.
“Clean?”
“Do
your best.”
* * *
A thin breech opened in the dark fortress of her madness, and the light of clarity shined briefly through. The light fell on her twisted thoughts and unraveled them like pale fingers on knotted rope.
Oh, God help me. I don’t want this, Bailey’s mind said.
Her voice failed to respond.
She thought she was lying down, but didn’t know for sure. There were weird and frightening surgical tools all around; most she’d never seen before. Some were hanging on what looked like cords and some seemed to float in the air. She’d never been in this chamber before. Not even her vivid imagination could have conjured its dark and alien horror.
She was aware of being stretched out, spread-eagle. There was a line of sharp pain running down her arms and on the inside of her legs. Her palms stung as if scalded.
Don’t. Please don’t.
There was motion all around and the familiar flash of thin alien fingers here and there. They brought the odd machinery to her body, and it hissed or hummed or stung her like fire, then vanished to be replaced by another dreadful thing to sting or pinch or burn, again and again.
She felt a buzzing at the base of her skull, and her teeth chattered from the vibrations. She knew they were entering her head and doing something to her brain, maybe through just a little hole.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Finally, they were done and a goon lifted her and carried her to a tank against one wall and unceremoniously dropped her in it. Still paralyzed, she sank down into the pale fluid, totally submerged until a goon’s thick hand lifted her head up out of it. The goon grasped a vine hanging over the tank; and when it did, the end of the vine came alive in a tangle of flailing tentacles. When it brought the tentacles in contact with her head, they wrapped around it. Wrapped tight, they held her up and kept her from drowning in the thick fluid. She felt the familiar crawling sensation right away. The things covered her arms and legs in a thick squirming mass.
As she lay there, the pain slowly subsided from her limbs like the heat of a summer day and left the just-right temperature of dusk. From time to time, an alien would come and examine her body with what she took to be a view scope submerged in the fluid.
She drifted and slept.
The goon returned, and, gripping the vine just right, caused it to release the tentacles enveloping her head. She watched them flail wildly as the goon moved the vine out of the way.
The goon lifted her roughly out of the tank and put her down on her feet. There was a dripper in one wall, and the goon poked her toward it. She moved dreamily to it and was glad to step in it and feel the familiar sensation of clean water on her skin.
When she passed her hand over the back of her forearm to wipe it, an action she’d performed perhaps ten thousand or more times, the hand stuck to the arm as if glued there. The sensation startled her, and she made it let go with a flash of her will, an act that surprised her further. She turned her hand over to look and, there, attached to her palm, as if it had always been there, was a soft and smooth, cup-like sucker, almost as broad as the hand itself. The memory of the reason she was in the lab in the first place made her bark a quick laugh.
She turned her arms over and saw the neat row of silver-dollar-sized suckers along the inside of each arm. She looked down at her torso and saw the random cluster of suckers on her belly starting just under her breasts. Another straight row ran along the front of each thigh. Turning her thighs outward one at a time, she confirmed the alien’s compliance with the last aspect of the design specification: dual rows of brownish suckers on the inside of each leg, running from her crotch to the back of each strong calf in a graceful sweep.
She lifted her arms up slowly and wide like a marionette and laughed hysterically. The water from the black nipples above rained down and ran over her in quick, shifting rivulets like headless snakes.
“Come one, come all! See Bailey Hall! The amazing fucking sucker woman!”
* * *
The thin edge of the razor sliced through Ned’s skin like butter. As he drew the blade through, Phil felt his patient tense and vibrate as if shocked. The incision filled with blood instantly. “Blot,” he said.
Mary reached over and blotted the blood from the wound. Before it filled again, Phil ran the blade along it, deepening and lengthening it.
“Again.”
The third cut traversed the worm’s channel at a slight angle, releasing a flow of dark liquid. The next cut split the channel open longitudinally a few inches, and Phil got a glimpse of the white, rolled body of the larva squirming in the channel.
“There it is. Blot.”
He picked up the sharpest of Mary’s little wire tools and held it at the ready while Mary cleaned the incision one more time. As soon as she was finished, he carefully impaled the worm with the wire and pried it out of the channel. The worm squirmed around on the end of the wire in big arches, its mandibles and short, sharp legs working madly. Phil crushed it under his foot. Its squirting juices made a slight squeak sound that roiled Mary’s stomach.
They’d gathered a couple of gallons of water in pots and cups and began to clean the wound by flushing it out. Once they’d gotten it as clean as possible, Phil sutured the incision as best he could, then they rinsed the area with the remaining water. Mary fashioned a pad and bandage out of the cleanest cotton she’d been able to find.
Ned was left with a four-inch-long wound with ragged stitching, a clumsy complement to the perfectly neat and straight scars from the aliens’ surgery.
Ned hadn’t made a sound through the whole operation.
“That’s about all we can do, my friend,” Phil said patting his arm.
Mary wiped his face and neck with a clean, damp cloth.
“It feels better. Still hurts like hell, though.”
“Try to get some rest. Don’t move around too much. Mary or me will bring you something to eat later.”
Standing in the tube, and out of earshot of Ned, Mary asked the question.
“Do you think he’ll make it?”
Phil thought about it.
“Without an antibiotic, I’m not sure. There was a lot of infection in there. You can’t get rid of it with water alone. We may have just slowed it down.”
“Too bad we can’t go to the aliens for medical assistance,” she said.
Phil shook his head. It was the ironic truth that if the aliens had found Ned in his present condition, they wouldn’t bother to heal him; they’d cut him up and use him for something else—use his parts.
“No Hippocratic oath,” Phil said wryly. “That’s their goddamned problem.”
“Ours, too, it seems,” Mary added.
* * *
The suckers were easy to operate once she got the hang of it. It was like wiggling her toes one at a time or forming her hand into a Vulcan greeting; once you did it a time or two, it was cake. She could tighten them or release them one at a time or in unison, and they were quite powerful if she willed them to be. She could make them exude a thick, clear fluid in copious amounts, which made them even more efficient, just by thinking about it. Doing that left her with a profound thirst.
Gilbert was especially fond of what she was capable of doing with her new anatomy, and she used them to quite literally, suck the next commitment from him.
It hadn’t been easy, though. He was reluctant to let her wander about unescorted because he was afraid she would get lost. At least that’s what he told her at first. He was unaware, of course, that she had an unerring sense of direction, even in the guts of an alien bio-vessel. In order to get her way at last, she’d complained relentlessly of being “cooped-up.” She’d been “cooped-up” long enough and didn’t want to be “cooped-up” any more. He’d finally agreed and said he would arrange it with the alpha. He did on their next meeting, but there were rules.
She could use the main tunnel only. The labs or the smaller tubes leading to the rear section were out of bounds. “There are limits to my inf
luence,” he’d said. If she got caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, there would be little he could do to protect her. “They don’t have the same respect for life that we have,” he’d added solemnly.
Knowingly, Bailey nodded her head.
Over the next twelve hours, she wandered out and back three times, staying out a little longer each time just to get him used to the idea. She was amazed at how few of anything there was in the ship. It seemed largely empty. The goons she did see on the last excursion, much to her surprise, walked right by her as if she were invisible. She’d flattened herself against the tunnel wall to let them pass and felt their enormity overwhelm her as they lumbered by. She may as well have been the wall itself for the attention they paid to her. The fact that they now ignored her pushed her confidence up and over the required level to set her plan in motion.
The next time she went out, she’d take her usual complement of notebook and maps, her watch, and down in the bottom of the little canvas bag she carried—the cellular phone. Gilbert called it his “trophy” and treated it like it really was one. He thought he’d stashed it away in secret, but she’d seen him put it in one of the clothes boxes against the wall. All she had to do was get it into the bag without his seeing it. She waited until he was napping and did just that.
She didn’t want to set off any alarms in his head by finding her gone when he awoke, so she waited until he was awake before she prepared to leave. While she waited, she drank water until she thought she’d burst.
“Where are you going this time?” he asked groggily.
“For a walk. I want to walk.”
“I thought you did that.”
She sighed heavily to act perturbed. “You don’t just do it once,” she grumped.
Gilbert sat up on the ledge and twisted until his torqued pelvis aimed him at her. Not looking at her, he lifted his hand up to signal good-bye. She started for the seam.
