“The pain will be excruciating,” Besser added, grinning. “But don’t worry. It will go away in a couple of months.”
Wade wasn’t listening anymore. He was screaming.
««—»»
Nothing happened when Lydia turned on the ultraviolet spotter. Either the battery was dead or the bulb was burned out. If the battery was dead, so was she. If it was the bulb, she could replace it with the spare stored in the receptacle, if she had time—
—which, of course, she didn’t. The holotype was all over her at once, jamming her into the corner, while the orb eyed sister stood as spectator. One moist padded hand pawed Lydia’s breasts; the other hand squeezed her buttocks. Lydia knew the .357 wouldn’t work against the sisters, but what about the holotype?
Her gun hand, however, was pinned behind her back.
The beast’s sweat soaked into her clothes; its breath blasted, foul as gas from a corpse pile. Its left hand popped open her pants and dragged them halfway down. The sister giggled softly as the hot mitten of meat plied Lydia’s sex.
Next she was slammed to her knees. Oh, no, she had time to think. Men all wanted the same thing apparently—even men from other planets. The holotype’s hand positioned the huge glans before her lips. There could be no misinterpretation: Lydia had two choices—she could suck, or she could die.
—Stick it in! the sister urged, a cheerleader from space. —Stick it all the way down her throat!
Lydia’s entire face felt squeezed shut. The snoutlike foreskin was retracted; the glans nudged her sealed lips…
—Lydia! Open wide!
I am not going to give head to an alien, she informed herself. No way in hell, uh uh, forget it.
But wasn’t this her only chance?
Lydia Prentiss steeled herself then, as no woman in history had. The crotch stench alone stupefied her. Between the holotype’s backward jointed legs hung a creviced scrotum which encased two testicles the size of coconuts. With her left hand, Lydia took hold of the thing’s penis. She gave it a tender stroke. Then she opened her mouth, began to lean forward—
With her right hand she drew her Colt Trooper and fired one round into the holotype’s scrotum.
The tight, hot bang! concussed in her ears. One of the testes exploded. The howl of agony which burst from the holotype’s throat sounded like demolition in a deep canyon. It teetered back and fell over, pad hands agrope at the encased mash that was once half its malehood. Pale yellow blood spurtled out, like paint.
During its throes, Lydia changed the UV bulb in the portable spotter. The sister remained where she’d stood, her bright white face having lost some its perverted gleam.
—You shouldn’t have done that, she said.
“Your mom wears boxer shorts,” Lydia replied. How she knew beforehand that it would work was a mystery. The sister bared her teeth. —I’m going to eat you now, she promised.
“Eat this instead.” When Lydia turned on the spotter, the sister went rigid and shrieked. It was an annoying sound, like a coronet played by a drunk. A sizzling could be heard, like meat frying—the sister’s face turned black, then her arms, breasts, and abdomen. The spotter’s invisible light was literally cooking the sister’s flesh, drawing rents to expose bone. The spheric eyes ruptured; she staggered in a circle while Lydia followed, cooking her back and buttocks. Then the sister flopped to the floor, vomited up some milky organs, and died.
The smoking pile sizzled. That was the end of her, but there was still the holotype. It lay cringing, the once proudly erect penis now shriveled. Fingerless hands clutched vainly at the loss between its sinuous legs.
“Hey, buster,” Lydia said.
The face, like a plop of raw meat, glanced up. Blood-red eyes fixed wide on her, this arrogant woman victor.
She put four shots from the Trooper into its convoluted head. The skull cracked, blowing hanks of brains and pale yellow blood in a fan across the black carbonized wall.
Lydia reloaded and got back her breath. No sense in wasting time. Thought, she thought. She plugged her key into the extromitter and thought about Wade.
««—»»
The scalpel flashed, lowering. All Wade could see were the two sisters’ intent faces and point filled grins. He felt the scalpel tip touch his temple…
Then the first sister’s eyes…exploded.
Suddenly he was released. Shrieks spun like mad banners about his head. Besser was bummeling forward, shouting “Noooo!” His shout was answered by a very loud bang!
Wade sat up. At the rear of the warren, he saw the two sisters…cooking. Their petite bodies blackened. Their faces bubbling. Soon their shrieks sputtered out, as their crisped mouths erped up white slop. They congealed in the corner, a blackened, smoking mass.
“Are you gonna sit there all day?” Lydia inquired.
“Lydia!” Wade shouted, and jumped off the table. She smirked as he giddily planted kisses all over her face.
“Save it for later. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Besser, curled on the floor, wheezed out blubbers. Pain bloated his face like a balloon. Lydia had blown his kneecap off.
“What about him?” Wade asked.
“Fuck him,” Lydia answered. She cocked the Trooper and pointed it at Besser’s head.
“Yes!” Besser begged. “Please!”
Lydia looked baffled. “You want me to kill you?”
“For God’s sake, yes! Don’t leave me for the Supremate!”
Wade remembered the hash room, Besser’s inheritance, no doubt, for failure. “Leave the fat fucker,” he said.
“Noooooo!” Besser wailed. “Pleeeeeeease, nooooooo!”
Lydia reholstered the Trooper. She and Wade left the warren as Besser’s pleas faded behind them.
She led him toward the next extromitter, explaining how she’d killed the sisters with the ultraviolet spotter. It wasn’t sunlight that killed them, it was the UV rays of the sun’s spectrum. Wade was impressed by her ingenuity, and also her faith. She’d come into this horrid place for him.
Then suddenly, she stopped. “Wade, before we go on, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What’s that. babe?”
“I love you.”
“Uh.” Wade hemmed. “Yeah.”
Lydia looked the way a girl always looks when she’s pissed. “Well?” she said, hands on hips.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to say you love me too?”
Jesus, Wade thought. Sure, he loved her, but he couldn’t tell her that. It wasn’t his style, not this soon. When a guy said that, he’d lose the upper hand. Instead, he said, “Ditto.”
Now she really looked pissed. “I knew it. No balls.”
“Hey!”
“I almost got buggered by a monster for you. The least you—”
“I seem to recall doing a little rescuing today myself.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about—”
“And this is not the time or place for a romantic spat,” he added. “We’re in a fucking spaceship.”
“Just shut up and come on,” she said, disgusted.
Wade dredged up some nifty terms from his Sociology 202 class. “We can isolate and identify the spatial parameters of our relationship later.”
“Isolate and identify this,” she said, and gave him the finger. “Besides, there might not even be a later.”
“What are you talking about? We’re home free.”
Lydia laughed. “Don’t you know how the extromitters work?”