Belonger (An erotic novel): Part One (34 page)

“
What’s out there?” Manassa
questioned
, gazing across an unvarying
horizon of hot sand.

“
Maybe nothing if luck
should fail us. But somewhere—though I don’t know
in
which direction—there
is
a
city,” Ione
said. “The women will be taken there, and it’s
the only choice left to us now
.”
She saw Emma close her eyes,
overburdened by the weight of their shameful incompetence. Mark
squeezed her hand.

“
We could hide in the forest
for a long time. How will it be safer
in
the city?
”
Manassa
inquired.

“
Because of its
size
,” said Ione. “There
are so many people there our presence
might
go unnoticed.
And…
” S
he tried to frame an elusive thought. “We may be protected by
certain features of their culture.”

They might still have lingered in the
Laplands debating the options, but a random patrol of men almost
discovered their camp, and Ione knew in time they would inevitably
be found.

“
We should go,” she
hopelessly concluded. “I thought they might leave in time, but
there are even more of those suited brutes up here now searching
for us. Four or five sex of them, at least. There might even be a
sen of people prowling for us at this point, and that’s a lot of
guys relative to the space available. We have to
try
to escape, anyway.”
The others numbly assented.

“
Rest up,” she ordered.
“We’ll leave tonight, when it’s dark. We’d be impossible to miss
out on the desert by day, and the heat would flatten us
regardless.”

When the moon hove above the
trees t
hey
fearfully
ventured forth,
treading
warm
sand
by
its
slanting
grey
ambience
. For a long time Ione watched
behind them, concerned for pursuit. Their tracks stretched clearly
back to the Laplands, a stitched silhouette that always led to
themselves, inscribed on a terrain that might never have known a
drop of precipitation. The benighted verdancy of the forest
dwindled, finally lapsed from sight.

Four nights came and went as
they
paced
the
desert by moonlight, which
alternated with the hammering heat of day in equal
installments
. They were abjectly thirsty,
having
consumed
the
freshly picked Lapland fruit
they stuffed
in the adventure bag over the first few marches.
It required the sexth part of one’s mass in liquid
consumption to feel sated from one sunrise to the next, and perhaps
a sixth of
that
amount to subsist for a day. But without anything at all to
drink they wouldn’t last more than a half-dox of days before
succumbing to dream.

Their footsteps ran ever straight to the
horizon behind them, were never again encountered—sole evidence of
meaningful progress across a featureless terrain. In the face of
the desert’s blatant threat to their welfare Ione had stopped
checking for pursuit.

They were shambling along
under a full moon on the fifth night when
Manassa suddenly stopped
.

“
Wasth thath oaphher
therrr…” she muttered, then made a heroic effort to moisten her
throat.

“
Loog,” she pointed. Far off
to one side was
an omphalotic mote on the
sand; a compact, tangled outline. N
ot the
Laplands, but not any kind of city either…

T
hey
stumbled
haggardly toward
this incongruous detail of the desert to find a
copse
of fragrant greenery
ringing a small pool of water. Cheering, they
drank thirstily then bathed—it was
large
enough for
that
—and
blissfully
relaxed
in the comfort of
soft grass and cool
shade through the sun’s long reign and well into the next
evening
.

Ione woke
from a hazy dream sometime after
midnight
,
exhaled
quietly and
blinked
. She lay without moving for a while, communing with
the desert. She had slept for a third of a day and
was fully rested for it, but found herself indolently unwilling to
make use of her restored vitality. A warm breeze scattered the
scent of raspberries on a few stubborn bushes, the only victual
rendered by the oasis.

Her immediate view was
dominated by Emma’s rounded form
, a
near-black silhouette facing away from her. Beyond, Manassa
sprawled on her back
, massive legs spread
wide.
Ione
watched
the steady cadence of her respiration
for a
while, sorrowfully contemplating the past. There was no future
anymore. How long would they be trapped at this hopeless little
place? She could reckon from the full moon, if she really wanted
to. Another sex of nights would transpire—one of them totally dark
but for the stars—before it was restored to circularity.

Without warning Emma rose silently to one
arm, glancing over her shoulder to Ione’s backlit form. She was
about to speak but Emma turned away first and rose delicately to
her knees, obviously assuming she was still slumbering.

As Ione
watched in disbelief Emma
crept
over
to
Manassa
, wavered for a moment, then
carefully positioned herself between the big
woman’s
thighs,
elbow
ing
forward to a point where her
face
was poised at
her
rounded
pubis. She longingly
inhaled its
musk.

After a few draughts
Emma
wriggled into a configuration that
allowed her
to settl
e
one hand between her own
legs.
Ione saw her
rump shiver as fingers deftly spun. Her tongue slowly dove to
the other woman’s crotch
,
almost touching
…

It swept delicately into
Manassa’s glabrous twat,
halted
delicately at
the
apse, settling under
her
clitoris
.
Emma masturbated with desperate concentration,
buttocks
twitching,
frigging her cunt with
furiously discreet fingers till orgasm
neared
. Her
stiffened
tongue never left its perch
at Manassa’s
sex—the only physical
connection Ione could see. It was minimal, but intimate enough to
ensure her traitorous lover would climax, though it would waken
Manassa first. The big woman’s conscious participation was required
for Emma’s fulfillment—it was not enough to simply be touching.
Emma knew this, of course, which meant she was sure Manassa would
keep her secret. What did that imply?

Manassa shifted
suddenly,
murmuring blearily out of dream.
Her
giant legs
folded cataclysmically
across Emma’s
back,
trapping the smaller woman in
place
,
bearing her
down as she struggled for balance. Emma obtained a bare new
equilibrium, awkwardly
propp
ed
on one
arm,
mouth
perched
just above
Manassa’s clitoral
prominence
as before. But her shoulders
quivered from the effort of maintaining her distance from the other
woman now.

Ione could almost feel her
maddened desire to taste the flesh at her lips—a lust that could
ruin them all. Confined to the tiny oasis with another dominant
woman, Ione knew there was only one way to resolve any serious
conflict of pride.
Her tears fell silently
to the grass, a pitiful contribution to posterity.

W
hen
Manassa shifted
again
Emma
rolled
painfully free of her embrace, returned with obvious
regret
to her own sleeping site. Ione never
made a sound. Unconcerned for predatory acts of cunnilingus,
Manassa had failed to wake through the affair.

Or maybe she had…

“
Oh, no,” Mark groaned,
rousing the others
. The sun hovered
malevolently over the desert. It was almost noon a few days
later.

“
What’s the
matter
?
” Ione
drearily inquired, and Mark pointed to the pool.

“
It’s soaping up.
Fast.”

In a moment
she
had joined him to
verify this. “The skulks must have dumped more. This place is
supplied by the subterranean Lap waters, obviously.”

“
There’s no telling when
it’ll flush through,” Mark quietly observed.

“
What happens if we drink
it?” Manassa wondered.

“
You slowly go
crazy.”

They pondered this, aware that the temptation
to drink would inevitably overpower this fear as thirst direly
oppressed them.

“
Out here it will be a long
time before anyone finds us,” Ione observed. “We won’t notice the
passage of time, but when we are revived things could be very, very
different. Not really the world we remember at all.”

They were silent for a term, driven to an
inevitable decision by the vice-like confrontation of past and
future the men had imposed on them.

“
I’m
leaving
,
”
Ione leadenly decided at last, no
longer speaking for the group.

They shuffled on for days,
barely moving finally. Manassa, who
was
half
-
carrying Emma,
let
her down when Ione
collapsed.

“
Well?” she
croaked.

No one had breath to reply, and they crouched
next to each other in a final, meaningless companionship as the
moon traced a long arc across the sky.

“
Wassat...” whispered
Mark.

No one responded, and after a time Manassa
pushed herself erect, drawing Ione’s bleary gaze.

F
ar
in the distance
she saw a thready
coruscation in the sky. Lightning.

“
The Lap,” she stuttered.
“We can go back…” They rose with a manic, stilted vitality,
stumbling toward salvation, rejuvenated by a memory of water so
plentiful it fell from the sky.

Night relented to dawn, and they staggered on
toward the last image of the storm, blinded by the sun as it hove
before them, leaning into each other, shoving forward as a single,
tortured entity in the end. But no lake greeted them, no trees
loomed.

They crested the lip of an
immense valley in the sand as twilight veiled the desert again.
T
hey had reached the
outskirts
of the City, a sunken
panorama of cheerily lit dwellings poised for the coming
night.

The City

Emma
followed Ione down to slouch in the lee of a
decorative
hedge lining a
road adjacent to the desert edge.
The voice
of the metropolis drifted up in snatches, a medley of disturbingly
uncorrelatable noises traveling a warm breeze that was equally
confounding to the nose. Just over the shrubbery
a
row of
houses lurked
, different
in minimal
ways
.
Emma tried to speak, but nothing comprehensible
resulted.

“
Errywhon allhrii?” Mark
slurred, eyes reddened in exhaustion.

“
Rill thyerred…” Ione
whispered.

“
Zheems lya nithe playth,”
Manassa croaked, staring in bleary interest.

Emma elected not to expand on these tortured
observations as she combed some of the sand out of her hair with
shaking fingers, breathing slowly. The others groomed themselves
with similarly coarse measures between muttered exchanges that
gradually returned to intelligibility as the moist air revived them
a little.

A vehicle turned
a
corne
r
down the street and swung
toward
their
position
as they watched.
It was
powered
by a
gnome
readily
visible
through the windshield, eyes
beaming a narrow white radiance to light the way ahead. A
man
reclined
t
o its left, hands perched on a steering
wheel, navigating the road with perfunctory
skill
.
A woman was
also present, consigned to the back seat by her immateriality to
this regime.