I have had better days, Wade considered.
Several sisters hung onto the car, snatching at White. White screamed honorably, gouging at their hideous, giggling faces. It’s me they want, Wade realized, not White. But White was in the way, and that was his hard luck. The sisters struggled further to get to Wade, clawing through White. White just screamed and screamed.
At last the car had run over the last of the cloaked women. Wade whipped out onto the Route, but he still had two sisters hanging onto the passenger door. Wade expertly sideswiped a fat oak tree and skimmed them off.
He drove for miles before daring to stop. The grille was pounded in, the fenders crumpled, the hood aglaze in shiny black blood. But White, Wade noted, had come out of this worse than the car. The sisters had pulled his face and scalp off, pulled his arms off, pulled his throat out. What now rode as passenger bore no likeness whatsoever to good old shucking and jiving Chief White. He’d written his last traffic ticket, that was for sure.
Wade idled up to a ravine. “Rest in peace, Chief,” he muttered.
He rolled White’s remains out of the car and took off back toward campus.
—
CHAPTER 30
Jervis grinned. “How about some entertainment, Lydia?”
Lydia moaned.
On the germinationwarren’s floorwall, Elizabeth Whitechapel lay nude, twitching. Orangish, swirling light hovered within the warren as Jervis led in an exceptionally grotesque holotype. Four shoulders composed its arched back, housing four sets of arms. A fifth set of arms served as legs, joined by a muscled buttocks. The beast’s sinuous skin shined blood-red in sweat. Puffy vertical slits formed its eyes, nose, and mouth.
By now, Lydia was catching on. The word spaceship didn’t sit well with her, but what else could this be? She’d picked up bits of conversation: they kept talking about leaving, leaving tomorrow night. As in…taking off? They’d also mentioned recharge, which could refer to a power supply of some kind. Other words, weirder words, had reached her ears, too. Stasisfield. Psilight. Interspecielmetis. The word alien didn’t sit well with her either, but if the labyrinth’s tenants weren’t aliens, what were they? She’d noticed many of the cloaked women. Many pranced about naked, their sleek white bodies faintly veined, their breasts nippleless, their pubes bare. They were clones.
Invaders, Lydia thought.
Movement caught her eye. The holotype, whose genitals looked like a cluster of spoiled grapes, hobbled a circle around the naked girl. The girl seemed paralyzed. Nevertheless, there was wantonness in her eyes. Somehow they’d induced a positive sexual response when the girl should be screaming bloody murder. The girl wanted this multilimbed thing. She wanted it to mate with her.
Oh my God, Lydia thought. With all eight of its webbed hands, the holotype kneaded its clustered genitals, which soon swelled to a budded red pole. The pole was then inserted into the girl’s mouth. This oral foreplay did not last long, however, before the thing’s member grew too large for the confines of the girl’s mouth. It was withdrawn, pulsing. Lydia’s stomach churned.
Jervis appeared at the static barrier, “How do you like the entertainment so far? Beats Seinfeld any day, huh?”
Behind him, shrieks of pleasure erupted, unearthly grunts, and a vigorous slapping sound. Thank God Jervis blocked Lydia’s view. “Why?” she croaked.
“The master plan,” Jervis encrypted.
Elizabeth Whitechapel screamed in staccato bursts. The wet slapping speeded up to a blur.
“He’s one of the bigger ones,” Jervis noted, “and I don’t mean shoe size. But we soften the girls up first so they can take it.”
Lydia grew dizzy. Her head spun with the screams.
“And if you think that fucker’s big, take a look at Pretty Boy over there.” Jervis pointed to the adjoining hold. “You haven’t forgotten about him, have you?”
No, as a matter of fact she hadn’t. The holotype they’d reserved for Lydia was thumping the repulsion screen with its fingerless hands. Its raw meat face surged forward, red lust in its gelatin eyes.
“You’re gonna get every inch,” Jervis promised. “Right up the ass.”
It beat its massive erection against the screen and mewled.
Jervis laughed out loud. Lydia fainted.
««—»»
Wade awoke just past noon, glare on his face. Sunlight, he thought. Oh, bliss. He’d hidden the cruiser behind the town theater and had dozed off. He’d slept as if dead.
By now the cops would be going apeshit looking for White, Peerce, and Porker. And there was still the question of Lydia; she was the only one Wade trusted enough to tell, but where was she?
He left the cruiser, electing to return to campus on foot. He’d have a hard time explaining to the gate guard how he came to be driving Chief White’s cruiser without the company of Chief White. He crossed campus stealthily, mindful of police. Something deep in his gut told him not to return to the dorm, but this he dismissed as nerves. It was daytime now. He had nothing to fear in the daytime, did he?
He trotted down the bike path which paralleled the student shop. He stopped in his tracks and nearly shouted with joy.
His Corvette sat shining in the shop lot.
Wade ran. “Lydia! It’s me!”
No reply. But she must be close by—the keys were still in the Vette, and on the console lay Tom’s pendant that she found on the Route, and the little pistol. There was something else too, something that looked like a portable tensor lamp. Hadn’t he seen it before, at the sciences center?
“Lydia!”
Pieces of padlock lay on the pavement. The shop door stood ajar. Wade knew something was…fucked up. Inside, he peeped, “Lydia?” First he noted the untarped cars, then the jugs. Then he found Lydia’s Colt Trooper Mark III on the floor.
Then he heard voices.
The wall? he thought.
The voices were coming from the wall. Like walking in a dream, Wade moved closer. What is that? He noticed a black dot on the wall. But when he put a finger to it, he discovered it wasn’t a dot at all, but a hole.
Hole, he thought moronically. In the wall. Voices… Hole. Wade put his eye to the hole and looked in.
Jervis was hanging a naked girl on a harness. Behind him, a wall glowed orange around racks of big circles, like kegs. Steam rose amid distant machine sounds.
As if in supervision, Professor Dudley Besser looked on.
“You know, Prof, five girls doesn’t seem like much.”
“It’s exponential, Jervis,” Besser said. “The fissionizationvessels are needed only to provide basic metis prototypes. From there, after computer calculated transfections, the desired metis types are mass produced exponentially.”
“Oh,” Jervis remarked. “Like a production line.”
“In a sense, Jervis, yes.”
Wade’s eye seemed sewn open to the hole.
Jervis was kneeling now, punching some kind of nozzles into the bottom of the hanging girl’s feet.
“We still leaving tonight?”
“Yes, we have to. The stasisfield is draining.”
Jervis glanced up in a sudden concern. “What about Wade?”