Valentines Heat I

by Ally Shields, Nessie Strange, Keith Melton, CL Bledsoe

“Yeah. You’re my first friend I’ve made in college.”

  She had stopped walking, and since she was holding my hand, I had to stop, too. She smiled and leaned in to kiss me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just, you know, making out a little. Like friends.”

  “You’re not even gay.”

  “I’m bi.”

  “Oh.”

  She started leaning in again, prompting me to step back.

  “Um, we’re supposed to be following Delilah.”

  “Yeah, we’re totally doing that.”

  “Not if we start making out.”

  She still had that dreamy smile on. Don’t get me wrong, Emily was beautiful in a way I could never be—an easy blonde beauty that guys went gaga over. But I wasn’t bi; at least I didn’t think I was. And, you know, she was drugged.

  She leaned in, and I found myself hugging her. It felt good. Really good. I started rubbing her back, and she was rubbing mine. It was like what I’d read about being on X was like—just the texture and feel of her clothes was so engrossing.

  “Stop it!” I yelled.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I mean it!” I pushed her away and held her at arm’s length. “We’re both drugged, and Delilah’s pheromones are making us be all…aroused.”

  She nodded, still grinning. I reared back to slap her, and she didn’t even seem to notice I was doing it, so I…well, I shook her. That didn’t do anything.

  “Listen,” I said. “Remember the party? I bet there’s lots of hot guys in there. And they’re all hurt from fighting. I bet they could really use some help. You’re pre-vet, right? You could still probably help them.”

  She nodded, and I dragged her down the street.

  “We could just make out a little, like friends, you know?”

  “Friends don’t make out.”

  We passed a guy who seemed to be humping the side of his car. It was a nice car, a little red sports car that looked like a jet on wheels. We were about five feet from him, and he didn’t even seem to notice us. He just kept humping the passenger-side door.

  “Hey,” Emily said and veered off toward him. “You’re cute.”

  He wasn’t. I mean, everyone and several things were cute right then, because of all the chemicals flooding through our bodies, but he was not cute. He was mostly bald for one thing, which, I’m sorry, wasn’t my thing. What hair he had was gray. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that gave the appearance that he was trying to look younger than he was. He saw us and waved as Emily moved toward him.

  “You look like my dad,” Emily said.

  “No,” I said. “No.” I hauled her back. The guy reached for her while still humping his car, like some crazy one-armed rodeo stunt. “Eyes on the prize.”

  I dragged her away. “Bye, Daddy,” she said, which was the creepiest thing I’d heard in a long time.

  Ahead, the street was filled with humping people. It was like a sex bomb had gone off, and the fallout was people humping each other. They were centered on the door of the row house where we’d had the party. Delilah strode past them with Dave in tow, like she didn’t even notice them, and went inside.

  “Just…try not to make eye contact,” I said as I stepped over the first writhing body.

  I don’t know how we made it inside. Emily was all smiles and waves and flirtiness. People reached up to us as we stepped over them. Some of them grabbed our legs and tried to pull us down. I kicked a few of them, and the sounds they made in response made me think they really didn’t dislike this. We just kept going, which was mostly me pulling Emily through the maelstrom of humping, until we got to the door, which was only like ten feet from the edge of the orgy.

  Inside, the first thing that really jumped out at us was the smell. Alcohol, yes, lots of it. But also blood and the sweat-stink of bodies. The marble columns and wooden floors made me think of Caligula which, OK, I never actually read or watched, but I saw the cover of the movie, and Helen Mirren was smoking hot back then…still is.

  So, yeah, as I imagined happened all through that movie, that’s what was happening inside. Lots of naked. Some groaning and general sexifying was going on. No horses, though. OK, maybe I watched a little of the movie.

  We stepped over and around the couples as well as we could. Kind of like outside, it was a somewhat unfocused orgy. There were some couples who actually seemed to be having sex, at least partially naked. Some still had their clothes on. I encountered one guy just writhing against the floor. Some of them didn’t seem to even realize what they were doing, or who they were doing it with, or that they were doing it with anyone. There was lots of moaning, lots of grunting, and lots of activity; it just seemed more frenetic than anything else. And most of them were bloody and bruised from fighting, which was kind of weird. I didn’t see a lot of babies being made is what I’m saying. It was kind of like they had this uncontrollable passion but didn’t really know what to do with it—like they were so worked up they couldn’t think enough to strip properly to have sex.

  It was a little difficult to gauge where we’d been before, since the floor was covered with people, but Delilah went over to where we’d first gotten chips—the table was actually still standing in a corner, though the chips were gone—and she and Dave looked around.

  “I think the fruit punch was over…there.” Delilah pointed to more or less the middle of the room.

  The table where we’d gotten the drugged fruit punch was in shards, but we went over anyway. There were several people in the way of us doing a decent search of the area, though.

  “We need to move these people,” I said.

  Emily nodded, reached down, and tapped a guy—who was passionately making out with a girl I think I recognized from a journalism class—on the shoulder. He didn’t even look up. She looked at me and I shrugged, so she started shaking him. No response. In the end, we both grabbed a shoulder and dragged him—with his “date” clinging to him like a baby chimp—a few feet away. I pushed another couple away with my foot, and the girl started trying to lick my shoe. I kind of wanted to let her. But we had things to do.

  We managed to clear out some room around the broken table—a long, thin, wooden, fold-out table. The punch bowl was broken, the punch spilled all over the area, mostly soaked up into people’s clothes, I imagined. About half the table was still standing, the other half flat on the ground. Dave found part of the bowl on the floor, with a little slurp of punch in it. He sniffed it and tasted it.

  “Don’t drink it!” I said.

  “Hey,” Emily said. She held up a phone.

  “Gimme!” I said. It was my phone. I could tell because of the screen saver of Teal’c from Stargate: SG1. I cradled it like a baby. There were two missed calls from my mom, which made me feel like a dork.

  “Should I call my mom back?” I asked Emily. I put the phone to my ear like I was calling. “Hey, sorry I didn’t get your call. A sex-apocalypse broke out here. Well, first it was a riot with all the guys trying to beat each other to death—”

  “And some of the girls,” Emily added.

  “And some of the girls. But then, it turned into a sex-apocalypse because we were drugged with roofies, and Delilah’s power went crazy. So now we’re just hanging out in the middle of an orgy, and some girl keeps trying to lick my shoe.” While I’d been talking, she’d crawled back over. I kicked at her—not too hard, but I hoped hard enough.

  “You’re funny.” Emily kept smiling and leaned in to kiss me. I turned away at the last moment.

  “It’s the pheromones,” I said.

  “I know, I know. It’s just so hard.” She pulled back. We looked at each other and lost it.

  My phone started ringing, so I answered it.

  “Hey, how’s everything going?” It was my mom again. Suddenly I felt stiff and sweaty.

  “Oh, hi. Everything’s cool. We’re having fun.”

  “What’s that noise in the background?” she asked. She could hear the moaning an
d various happy noises people were making.

  “Uh, the noise? You know, it’s the band and people talking and stuff.”

  “Sounds like you’re at the zoo or something.”

  I had no idea how to respond to that. “It’s a sample. In the song.” Emily was making all kinds of “no, no!” motions, but I couldn’t think clearly enough. “Hold on, that girl’s licking my shoe again.” I leaned down to her. “I was just walking outside; I could’ve stepped in all kinds of stuff. Maybe some dog poo or something. That’s really unsanitary.” I put the phone back to my ear. “She doesn’t seem to mind.” Then I realized what I’d done. “Shit,” I said.

  “Are you OK?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah, we’re fine. Dave’s here.” I said it to make her not worry, and then realized I might’ve made it worse. “Not because anything’s wrong. He just dropped by to surprise Delilah.”

  “Well that’s sweet,” Mom said. “OK, honey, it sounds like you’re having a good time, whatever’s going on. Just don’t do anything stupid, OK? Be safe. And call me if you need a ride.”

  “I will, Mom. Thanks for caring.”

  “Of course I care,” she said.

  After I hung up, I lost it.

  “You just told your mom somebody was licking your shoe,” Emily said.

  Delilah and Dave had moved away from us and were looking around the room for something. They were turning people over and looking at faces. We made our way over as they turned a young guy over who was…well he was by himself, but he still seemed to be having a good time, if you follow me.

  “Him,” Delilah said.

  “He’s one of the guys who was watching us,” Emily said.

  I remembered what she was talking about—there had been three guys watching us pretty intently when we got our drinks. I don’t remember how we all knew—maybe Emily pointed them out to us at the time. But I remembered us all noticing how creepy they were.

  “Hey,” Dave said. He shook the guy to distract him from his…self-attention.

  “Snap out of it,” Delilah said, and then she did something that actually made everyone in the vicinity snap out of it. Again in hindsight I can say it was probably mostly pheromones, but her face seemed to shift to something like a gargoyle. Her eyes glowed red; even her voice seemed to deepen. She picked the guy up—just a straight lift, sliding him up the wall with one hand so he was dangling a few inches above the floor. The guy immediately spasmed in fear. “What did you put in the punch?” Delilah asked.

  “It was Timmy’s idea!” he said. Well, first he screamed and clawed at the air in terror, and then he cried for a little while and begged for his mother, but when all that was done and his pipes had been cleared, so to speak, he started ratting out his compatriots.

  Delilah lowered him back down to the floor. The guy didn’t even try to catch himself or stand up. He was still blubbering, but the gist of what he was saying seemed to be that his friend Timmy had convinced him and another guy to lace the punch.

  “Where are the other two?” Delilah asked.

  What followed was the strangest game of hide-and-seek ever. We had to sort through all the people left in the house so Alex—the one spiker we’d caught—could identify them. But he was so scared he didn’t seem to be able to walk.

  “Maybe you could turn off your scary juice, Delilah?” Emily asked. “So he can help us?”

  Delilah turned on her with a savage look that made us all step back. “This piece of garbage is a potential date rapist,” she said. “He’s lucky I haven’t castrated him.”

  None of us could really argue that, so we had to listen to the guy blubber and sob, occasionally batting at things he imagined were attacking him, while we dragged him around to various couples, disengaged the male—or each male—long enough for him to yea or nay them, and then let them return to their endeavors.

  “When is this going to wear off?” I asked.

  “The ventilation in here isn’t so great,” Dave pointed out. “Do you guys at least feel better?”

  We did. The effects of…everything…were wearing off for us since we’d eaten, though I had a massive headache that was threatening to make my head explode.

  Dave dragged Alex to the next couple, which was actually a threesome with two women and one guy.

  “That’s Brett. He sneaked it in,” Alex said. Delilah grabbed Brett’s shoulders and picked him up to look directly into his, which prompted him to scream. The two girls went back to doing what they were doing, apparently not even missing him.

  “Did you put drugs in the punch?” Delilah asked, her eyes glowing, her powers on full-bore.

  “Oh God!” he said. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Where’s the other one?” Delilah asked.

  “I don’t know!” He started crying. Delilah’s patience was pretty much in the negative. She started shaking the guy, which didn’t seem to be helping, but through his blubbering, a confession of their true intentions emerged. Basically, they’d sneaked the stuff in and spiked the punch to get everybody in the mood.

  “I didn’t want to be another lonely loser on Valentine’s Day!” he said, which hit a little too close to home.

  “So you wanted to be a rapist loser?” Delilah asked.

  That made him cry again.

  “We just thought it would loosen everyone up. We could find some girls to dance with, you know, and if things heated up…” he sputtered out.

  I almost started to feel sorry for the guy because of his extreme patheticness, when he kept talking.

  “Everybody would have a good time. That’s what the punch was for—to make sure the girls enjoyed it.”

  We were all quiet for a moment after he said that. Delilah grabbed Alex, who was shaking in terror, from Dave. “Find the leader,” she said.

  Maybe Delilah’s powers were getting stronger, or maybe she was just getting madder, but suddenly Alex found legs and started going from couple to couple, interrupting a lot of happy time, until he finally called out and waved to us.

  We found Timmy over by the stage, making out with another guy.

  “Sorry,” I said to the guy when we took Timmy away. The guy watched with a sad look on his face for about ten seconds and then found another couple and joined them.

  “Are you Timmy?” Dave asked.

  “Hi,” Timmy said with a big, stoned grin.

  “Did you drug the punch with the intention of raping people?” Dave asked.

  Timmy nodded, still stoned. “I mean, not rape, you know? We were just going to have a good time.”

  “A good time!” Delilah screamed. She grabbed Timmy and turned on her juju, which had the usual effect of leaving him quivering and terrified.

  When she’d satisfied her immediate desire for revenge, we were left with three scared, blubbering assholes.

  “What are we going to do with them now?” Emily asked.

  “We could kill them,” Delilah said. “No one would know. They could blame it on the riot.”

  This made them blubber and beg even more.

  “We can’t kill them,” Emily said. Everyone looked at her. “We might get in trouble.”

  “It’s harder than people think to dispose of a dead body,” Dave said.

  “Um, hello? I work at a funeral home,” I said, winking at Emily. “I could incinerate their bodies. We wouldn’t even have to kill them first. We could just tie them up and gag them, so they don’t scream too loud.”

  “Or we could drug them,” Emily said. “Make them tell us where they got the drugs, and we could get some more and drug them, so they don’t scream while we burn them.”

  “That was a little dark,” I said.

  Emily smiled, sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “Let’s get them outside, so we can call for a car to come get them,” Dave said.

  He grabbed Alex while Delilah grabbed the other two. Dave walked his out, but Delilah half carried, half dragged hers around, and sometimes over, the remaining couples. The tone in the
room seemed to be moving toward something more somber. Maybe it was because the pheromones were thinning out, or maybe folks were just tired. Delilah dragged them out the door and straight down the stoop stairs to the sidewalk.

  “Hey Dave,” I said. When he looked, I pointed. There were two cop cars pulled up to the curb a little away from the house.

  “What…?” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure they’re in there with everybody else,” I said.

  He looked at me and at the cars. I’ll give him this: he recovered pretty quickly and went to the nearest one. The passenger-side door was still open from when the officers had jumped out. He rummaged around and returned with three sets of handcuffs, which he used to cuff the wannabe rapists’ hands behind their backs.

  “Sit,” he said, and they did.

  “It looks like I’ve got to go dig these officers out of the mayhem,” he said. He rubbed his head.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  He smiled and looked at Delilah. Her tough-girl facade evaporated.

  “I’m so sorry, everyone,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s their fault,” Emily said, motioning toward the cuffed guys.

  “Hey, we just wanted to have a good time,” Timmy said. “We just wanted everyone to have a good time.”

  Before any of us could even think of a fitting response to that, Delilah pulled Timmy close, dangling him in the air, so the whole of his world was her glowing eyes and her enraged features.

  “I was one of the girls you drugged, one of the girls you were planning on raping. I could hurt you in ways you can’t even imagine…” He started whining when she said that. It felt like we collectively inhaled, waiting for what would happen next. “But I won’t right now,” she continued. “Right now, I’m busy, and you aren’t worth the trouble. I will later, though. Someday, sometime, I will find you, and I will punish you. You won’t see me coming. No matter where you go, I’ll track you down. And maybe I’ll do to you what you wanted to do to me. And maybe you’ll find out that you won’t enjoy it. Maybe,” she added, and his whole face lit up at the prospect of a reprieve. “Maybe if you tell the police everything you know about who sold the drugs to you, where they got them, where to find these people, everything…”