The Other Kind (The Progeny of Evolution Series)
Page 7
Sam laughed. “That’s the best part. She told them a hit and run driver struck her on the way home from a meeting. I have to say, I would not have been so imaginative. Heck, the manipulative little thing convinced her parents it was their idea to enroll her in the group.
“She’s a smart pup.”
Chapter Five
A Girl and Her Prey
We did more than sterilize the freezer. Using an honorarium from a paper I published, we bought a new unit and gave Sam’s old one to Ed. Up to then he stored kills in a portable refrigerator. On its last legs, the cantankerous piece of junk didn’t keep anything fresh more than a few days. Sam ministered to his episodes of minor food poisoning at least twice.
Sam graduated in June and got a job at the local museum. The same month the lease expired on her apartment and she moved in with me. Features of my complex included a laundry on the property. We gave away all of her furniture and put the new freezer in our bedroom. For a while I missed the fitful starting of the old unit, but the new one hummed imperceptibly and maintained the contents without freezer burn.
During the move we lost most of Sam’s kill, the man from the coin laundry. Lycans have greater appetites than vampires owing to the larger amount of energy expended in their morphs. In addition to going through kills much faster than me, she sent cuts home with Cynthia after each group meeting.
“Keep them handy, dear,” she advised the youngster. While Cynthia still ate regular food, she occasionally developed a taste for cuisine more rare and human. The frozen steaks and chops satisfied those appetites. It beat taking a chunk out of her dorky little brother’s neck.
Sam needed a fresh kill and fast.
While we had pair bonded and remained monogamous, having sex in connection with a hunt remained necessary. After thinking it through, we concluded the plan to hunt together wouldn’t work. I think it had to do with the man from the coin laundry, but she said our styles and needs differed too much. I accepted the explanation and let the subject drop. In some ways her argument made sense. I sought prey away from home but she needed to have the privacy of the apartment. The thought of being present when Sam had sex before dispatching a kill simply didn’t sit well. We discussed putting them down with my bite to avoid intercourse. The Kutzu worked faster than her drugged tea, but not knowing how the chemical might affect her we rejected the idea, not to mention dealing with the inevitable bowel and bladder evacuation. The thought disgusted her, and required committing a whole evening to an unpleasant clean up. We agreed to a routine. She would phone me when on the way home with prey. I would leave the apartment and hang out in the recreation area. After finishing, she would call me there. If I didn’t hear anything after fifteen minutes I should assume something went wrong and get home ASAP.
For this kill, Sam’s chose a young black man from the shelter where she did volunteer work two afternoons a week. The residents held her in great esteem, especially the females with children. Anytime I visited, a gaggle of eager little ones marked her location as she read a story or played a game. She rarely talked about it, but I knew being unable to have children left a large hole in the middle of her life. The place also appreciated her lethal right cross delivered with the aplomb and power of a middleweight. More than one estranged husband or boyfriend experienced the consequences of its effect when he got out of line with a resident.
The males at the shelter were a docile lot, mostly recovering alcoholics or general undifferentiated homeless. By contrast, the one she screened had a reputation for violence and, of course, no family. He spent almost half of his twenty-two years in the tender mercies of one form of incarceration or another. At the shelter he behaved. He had observed, first hand, Sam’s right cross in action. To his pleasant surprise, she came on to him. I cautioned her with regard to choosing an individual as unstable as he appeared to be, but she didn’t agree.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, now,” she said. “Those wacky ones are the easiest. Their libidos rule. Besides, isn’t hunting scumbags a public service?”
I finally dropped my objections when she pointed him out to me one afternoon. He stood maybe two inches taller than she. Heck, she could probably take him without morphing.
The evening of the planned kill I fretted in the lobby of the recreation room, turning down an invitation to play a game of ping pong. I thought of the stopwatch in my trouser pocket, how I didn’t want to be distracted from checking it every twenty seconds or so. Tracking the elapsed time pretty well pushed all else from my mind. I counted ceiling tiles. Midway through reading about Native Birds of the Southeast on a wall poster I glanced at the watch dial. Nearly fifteen minutes had elapsed. No phone call yet. Close enough. I headed out the door.
When I arrived at the vestibule, a cold hand grabbed something in my chest. An ominous silence greeted me. The lights burned brightly in the front of the apartment, like the other time. I opened the door. The smell of candle wax used to mask the odor of Sam’s drug had pretty much faded away. On the floor lay a dark brown human form. He stretched out naked, in a rigid posture of attention with back arched and chest thrust outward. Sweat covered his body with a dull luster. A wooly mass of pubic hair hid his genitals. From it, his penis barely peeked out. The small brownish tip lay flaccid against a thigh. Black dreadlocks spread out from his head like the photographic negative of a sunrise. Wide eyes stared, the whites as big as ping pong balls. Faintly dithering lids were the only sign of life. Sam touted the painless effects of the drug, but from what I observed, I doubted it.
“He’s close to death,” Sam’s disembodied voice explained from the darkness of our bedroom. “Just another minute more, I think.”
I took a deep breath. Scents in the room narrated the incident. She did him in the living area. A wet spot darkened the carpet in front of the couch. Soon after finishing, the drug’s effect told him something was wrong. Attempting to flee, he staggered a couple of steps, collapsing where he lay. I surveyed the kill, now stone cold dead, at parade ground attention. I thought of my fantasy where I killed a male for the sake of a woman. I enjoyed it well enough back when Carole and I did it. After we went separate ways, it remained no more than a highly arousing fantasy. When presented with the real thing after so long, I felt indifferent, even slightly repulsed. I guess I’d changed.
A match rasped and flickered into flame in the bedroom. I watched the light move around in the dark space, pausing for few seconds to leave a new flame behind. Sam lit around a dozen candles. “To kill his scent,” I thought bitterly.
I should have known better.
“You may come in,” she said in the sing song voice she used when she planned a special surprise. “Don’t worry about the prey. He isn’t going anywhere.”
I stepped into the bedroom. One of the dinette chairs sat in the largest open area of the room, between the freezer and the bed. Sam arranged the candles in a semicircle behind it, to provide backlighting. They smelled like flowers instead of the fading smell of church wax from the front. Sam stood in the dark by the entertainment center and turned on the CD player, filling the room with music. A sultry slow version of the Gershwin tune Summertime done with saxophones filled the room.
She stepped into the light, naked except for stiletto heeled shoes and black stockings pulled smooth and tight, almost to the top of each leg. The heads of decorative hairpins twinkled from within the thickness of hair, holding it up in a tight twist. A small black derby cocked to one side and tipped down in front perched atop the red mass.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she orated over the music, “tonight I present a man who needs no introduction. He is one of the kindest, loving, and—above all—most patient men around. A man who has my heart in his lock box. A man who never fails to bring out the best in me. The one, the only—drum roll, please—Doctor Jim.”
While speaking, she spun her way toward me in a series of sharp rotations. She stopped abruptly. We stood facing one another. Besides the music, her short snapping br
eaths were the only sound. She surveyed me with those feral verdant eyes, placing a hand on each of my shoulders. I stared down at her expectantly. With gentle nudges, she guided me toward the chair, and made me sit. Now, she towered above. My face aligned with her hips.
The song poured slowly and sweetly from the CD like maple syrup. She did a seductive little routine, full of languid undulations and lingering touches by all parts of her to all parts of me. Lightly, she brushed and swayed like a large underwater plant in a South Pacific tidal current. Summertime ended, and another tune, with a faster beat, started. Suddenly, she made a high kick burying a small warm heel in my shoulder. I caught the scent emanating from the damp entrance of her femininity. To my joy it was all her and nothing from the kill. Suddenly I felt guilty that I misjudged her reason for lighting the candles and thanked my stars for keeping silent.
Effortlessly she lifted her heel, returning her leg to the floor, spun around, and sat on my lap with legs apart. I became aware of her fiery sheath as it warmed and grew wet through the material of my trouser leg. Oh, the delicious aroma! Like the fragrance of jasmine rice, I suddenly remembered. “This is our room,” she uttered in an intimate tone. “In here, as long as we are together; I will love you and no one else. The bed has only our scent. It will be ours and ours alone. I love you for trusting me.” She cupped my jaw in both of her hands, planting a big wet kiss on my lips.
Pulling away, she launched into another routine, arousing me with a dancing and twirling tease to a new and even faster song, the theme from Flashdance, I think. The girl made superb use of the lighting. During the routine she would suddenly freeze, posed in a sexual position for a few seconds but always obscuring her female vertex in shadow, only to glide back in motion. Later she boldly rubbed it against me as she stripped. The hat went first, tossed insouciantly in my direction with a confident pout. She paused between each item she took off to work on me. My trousers slid to the floor. With impatience she ripped my shirt open. The buttons flew in all directions, making soft ticking sounds as they landed somewhere in the dark. The shirt hung limply around my shoulders while she removed the stilettos. I shuddered as she scraped the heel of each shoe across the resilient muscles of my bare chest, leaving a trail of red arousal and inducing a powerful erection. So much blood went into it my brain came up short, making me light headed.
Pulling away, she lay on her back, legs drawn up, spinning rapidly. I glimpsed her pink sliver as it flashed momentarily in the light. She pulled off the stockings, stretching the second one between the toe of one foot and the opposite hand, diagonally across pelvis, stomach, and breast. She seemed to make love to it, writhing in mock orgasm. I shed the shirt and started to join her. Spotting my intentions, she popped to her feet, motioning me to sit back down. I felt a bit silly standing in my underwear, but she took care of the detail by pulling them off, leaving me naked. The dinette chair was cold when I sat back down. With a sure hand, she held the rigid maleness as my breath came in ragged gasps. For a few seconds she studied it with her head turned to one side, as if she had never seen one before. From under the chair she took a washcloth from a bowl of water. Caressing my shaft with warm breath to offset the cold cloth, she wiped me down.
“Oh my,” she cooed as, despite her efforts, the wet cloth made me shrivel. “We have to do something about this.” She wrapped unguent lips around the end of my swarthy member, returning it to full-strained size. “Better?”
“Much,” I gasped.
We sat face to face, her legs straddling mine, and claimed each other with a lingering kiss. Our tongues avidly explored and fed upon the energy radiated by the interior of the other’s mouth. I held her tightly with one arm. With the index finger of the free hand I traced the curve of her body. Starting between her shoulders, my finger slid slowly and lightly over the smooth flesh of her spine. I drifted down to the small of the back, around a buttock and hip, ending at the front, always skirting and teasing the intimate areas. I lingered at the navel, circling it several times, feeling the tension build within her like the slow draw of a bow string.
“You are a bad boy,” Sam uttered.
The vaporous essences of our rising excitement saturated the air. She reached behind for my member, placing only the wet tortured glans inside, and prevented deeper penetration by partly standing. With a slow deliberate rhythm, her intimate opening squeezed and released the part of me she permitted to enter. As the erection grew, she leaned forward to keep precisely the same amount imbedded. She shivered when her sensitive bud scraped over the top of my hot shaft. With each stroke a sinfully wonderful fire coursed through my veins. In the last seconds before climax I achieved a final increment of hardness. It felt as stiff as a broomstick. As she climaxed the walls of her torrid crevice repeatedly squeezed the sensitive spot tucked below the head of my staff. I erupted with a shattering release, flooding hot white lava into the deepest folds of her dark enclave.
For a few minutes we sat on the chair, intimately joined until the rapid rising and falling of our breathing slowed. I thought how when we made love I learned something new about her, as if after each time I lifted an infinitesimally sheer veil to reveal a clearer picture of what lay underneath. Something told me there was more than pure unvarnished Sam down there. I pictured under the last veil would also be the Universe with all of its answers. Were the answers as simple as the great religions believed, of good and evil and eternal reward or damnation? Or were they wrapped in the mind boggling theories of science with its string theory, chaos, and butterfly effect? Engaged in such weighty thinking, I invariably felt the stirrings in my soul of a conviction there was a future, not only for Sam and me, but for all our respective kinds; a destiny far greater than the passion of a pair bond.
It may appear odd, even blasphemous to humans, for a vampire to suggest his kind have souls. Creation is one of two possibilities. Either it is the product of random chaos or of intelligent design. As a mathematician I have observed too many events in nature to accept the probability they occurred by pure chance. Sam and I meeting is a good example. Each of us was one of no more than seven hundred among our respective communities, meaning fourteen hundred individuals scattered in a world population of nearly seven billion. Lycans and vampires lived for centuries, each relegating the other to myth. Our cultures went as far as ridiculing, even persecuting, supporters of any belief to the contrary. Somehow the two of us met and found compatibility. Imagine two honey bees from hives located on opposite coasts of the United States crossing paths over the midwest.
I worked it out. It was a one in four trillion chance.
We were left with intelligent design. I believed our mutations happened for a reason. A vast and cool entity with infinite patience used us and our human brethren to further its plan, the end of which we may never know and most likely could not understand—no more than a field of wheat understood why it was cultivated and protected from vermin only to be cut down at its fruition. Whatever breathed life into humans also created us. In our creation, it gave us unique instincts and natural tendencies. We fed on humans to live and not because we chose to do it over logical alternatives. The practice was evil from the human viewpoint but is simply our nature, implanted by whatever created us. In all demonstrated behaviors, besides preying on humans, we were no better or worse. We were as law abiding, as generous, as loving, and as evil, as they. So yes, I believed if humans could be said to have souls, then I believe The Other Kind, or The Others, as we’re coming to call ourselves, have them, too.
Chapter Six
The Girl Who Emerged on the Living Room Floor
The summer ripened and hardened. The dog days of August arrived, the driest month of the year in our area. The pair of hawks still circled above the glen of live oaks, now accompanied by two fledglings. I often watched them ride on the air currents, intently searching for food with eyes like onyx pebbles. Suddenly one broke off, plunging toward the ground to be lost for a minute in the trees, and dramatically burst into
the light with a squirming piece of something in its beak. The willow tree leaves wilted in the afternoon heat that pounded down like an invisible hammer from the white hot ball floating above, but now the earth showed less of her northern face to the sun. Since the first day of summer the days became shorter, proving from the moment of conception each act of creation held within it the beginning of its own demise.
It was a Saturday in late August. Outside it rained, breaking the seasonal drought, not a quick violent spring storm but a steady downpour bleeding from dark turgid clouds. It started around mid-morning. By late afternoon it showed no signs of stopping. Sam and I spent the day mostly making love. The gurgling sound of water flushing through the downspout outside our bedroom window provided continuous update of the weather. In the afternoon we took a break to sit in the front room and watch the wind worry the palmetto fronds outside the apartment, all shiny and green in the storm’s wavering breeze. I dreaded having to go out for an evening class. As I threw on a raincoat and prepared to leave, University Administration phoned with good news. A roof leak in the attic of the mathematics building flooded the auditorium, forcing cancellation of classes until at least Monday. I hung up the phone, returning to the bedroom where Sam remained in the afterglow of love making.
Since turning a hundred, I thought it a good night if I did it four or five times, but Sam disrupted the laws of aging as sure as stars bend light rays in the depths of space. Around her I felt thirty again. Still, we already did it seven times and didn’t know if I had much more to give. After the respite of the evening class, I happily anticipated resuming where we left off, but right then, I felt sore and spent.
I entered the darkened room full of our scents from time well spent. The only light came through the open windows in the other rooms as we religiously kept the drapes in our room drawn tight. Sam had gotten up and stood with her back to me in front of the freezer, preparing to open it. “Did you forget something?” she asked upon hearing my footsteps. Outside, a gust of wind splattered rain against the window pane.