She was hot. She was hungry. The furnace needed to be fed, or change would turn on itself and begin to consume her. The need steeled her resolve to get moving again. It required no plans, no thoughts or words. She had to eat something.
She got up, and saw she was not alone.
The air was alive with him—medicines, sweat, body ash, plastic, sanitizers, blood, terror and awe. All for her.
It was the albino with the ropy dreadlocks. He'd taken off his spacesuit, but he still wore a particle-filter mask, rubber gloves and safety goggles. His eyes swam against the lenses, bulging alarmingly as they darted around her as if she were naked, and hounds were coming to tear him apart.
She stood and approached him, trying to keep the warring impulses that wracked her from showing on her face. One moment, she saw a skinny, oily scientist, but the next, he was prey, a weak thing that would make her stronger. She saw herself ripping him open and reveling in his insides, washing away her fears and insecurities in hot, sweet blood. She saw that it would be just, it would be natural. It was what she was, now.
He sensed what was coming. He backed away, but still he tried to normalize the situation with his jabbering. "Ms. Orozco? I'm Dr. Jonah Barrow. You're hungry, aren't you? I can arrange to have you fed, if you'd be willing to move to other quarters—"
"I like it here," she said.
"Well, I want to—to—assure you that we don't share Dr. Wittrock's paranoid hostility—"
"You don't want to kill me, you just want to cut me open." She came closer.
"No, that's not true!" Barrow took another step backward, tripped over an exposed root and sat down hard. Something plastic broke in his hip pocket, and he rolled over, moaning. His blood smelled like music on the air. "We want to help you, and by helping, understand what—what you—"
"You want to know what it was like?"
Barrow steadied himself against a tree. Blood seeped through the seat of his smock. His wounded eyes got bigger as she got closer.
"You want to know what it felt like, when He was in me?"
He backed up against the tree, and she circled it.
"Have you ever been raped, Doctor?"
He shook his head vehemently.
"No, of course not. You're a man, sort of. Well, it was like being raped by a god. Every moment of every minute of every hour—He's inside you. Driving you, running you, making you forget when He uses you to do something you wouldn't—and you can't hide from Him, you can't even go into shock and hide in the back of your brain, because that's where He lives."
She raised a hand before his face and flexed it. Her fingers were still bloody, and they burned. Her nails tore out of her fingertips between them, and curled towards his goggling eyes like flowers toward the sun. "You want to
feel
what it was like?"
"We—I—want to help—" "You can help me," she said, and her claws went for his face.
He screamed. But her claws never got there.
"Let go of me,
pindejo
! Let me—"
Storch held her arm in one hand and caught the other as it snapped at his jugular. "Don't," he said.
Barrow flung himself out from between them and ran away, but stopped and watched them. "You have a right to know what he did to you," he said. "What you are, now."
Storch pinned her gaze. "Don't listen to him. He's a fucking loon."
"Your blood has proteins in it that mammals don't make. Bacteriorhodopsin, it's what's changing your skin. Your body uses the light to make energy, using a protein archaebacteria used three billion years ago. Fibroblast cells, Ms. Orozco, they assist in tissue regeneration, in growing lost limbs—in salamanders and other amphibians. It's a trait that our ancestors lost nearly one hundred million years ago, but you have it. Your DNA remembers—"
"Shut up!" Storch barked. He turned on Barrow, but the albino doctor only stepped back a few more paces, and took shelter behind another tree.
"He didn't tell you what you are, did he? Every living cell on earth descended from a single parent organism. You're an atavistic return to the common ancestor, the proto-Shoggoth—"
"GET OUT!" Storch chased him to the airlock and slammed it shut after him.
When he came back, Stella sat back down in the clearing. Her head spun and her body burned, trying to tell her that she could take him. He would make her even stronger—
He stood over her. "You've got to learn to control yourself," he said.
"I'm hungry."
"It won't kill you. They'll let us stay here, but you can't kill and eat people."
"Wasn't a person, just a fucking scientist."
"There are new rules, and you have to learn them if you're going to stay alive."
She laughed. "That's what it's all about, right? Staying alive?"
He chewed his words a moment. "That's all I ever learned in school."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why stay alive? Idiot."
He didn't have any snappy comebacks to that. He sat down beside her. The trees whispered dendriform dreams above their heads. Questing, thirsty roots siphoned water out of the soil beneath them. Camera starlight twinkled. There was something so intense about silence, now, an imminent threshold beyond which one could forget how to break it with words, could forget words, forget time and death and become truly
alive
. She sensed that he felt it too, but he fought against it, struggling upstream to anchor himself, and her, with words.
"Well, I guess you're safe, now…"
"I guess I should thank you, I guess—for saving me, I mean, back there. I thought I was finally going to die—"
"I had reasons."
"Like what?"
"There are worse things than being dead," he said. "You can lose more than your life, now."
"What do you mean?"
"You saw it. It almost happened to you, just now. You can lose yourself, lose what it means to be human."
"You say it like that's a bad thing." She tried to smile at him, but his frown made her bite her lip.
"You think you're free now, but you're not. Your body owns you, now. It wants to survive, and it'll do anything—it can do anything—to survive. Keogh kept it in check, but you're still just along for the ride. You've got to fight it every instant to keep from becoming something you can't even imagine."
"And what are you now, Storch? You're not human, any more than I am. What are you holding out for?"
"I'm the man who's going make Keogh extinct. I'll do or become whatever I have to, to get Him."
"Then you don't want to stay alive all that much either. What then, Sergeant Storch? You saved me, thanks a lot, but what then?"
Storch wiped his face clean of whatever trace of expression was growing on it. "Then I'll just live."
She bit back a smart retort, held herself silent until she felt a knot inside. She untied it. "I used to fight so hard for everything—losing anything meant death, and nobody was going to take it away from me. Then I found out I was going to die. After everything I'd been through, stupid fucking cancer. And then—after it happened and you—after I fell into the hole, I had plenty of time to wonder what the hell I'd wanted to live so bad for, anyway."
"I'm sorry about that," he mumbled.
She nodded. "Wasn't anybody's fault," she added, when watching him squirm got old. "I'm getting over it."
"Life is just something you have to get through, is what my daddy used to say. It's a test, and you just have to endure it. Be true to yourself, and you'll get by."
"My mother believed the same thing, more or less. My father told me that, anyway, before he left me. But isn't there—I mean, shouldn't there be a moment, in between the fights and the bullshit and the knowing you're going to die, and none of it means shit, isn't there ever a moment when life is its own reward? When you're just glad, and proud of yourself for just being? Have you ever had one of those, Storch?"
He shrugged and looked away, as if hoping something would jump out of the trees and attack them. "I can't say as this one leaves me much to complain about."
She laughed again, caught herself when she noticed he was smiling. The bunched-up muscles around his jaw subsided and his chewed-up lips peeled away from his teeth.
"Oh, so you do know how to smile, sort of" she said.
"I've seen folks do it on TV, now and again." Then it was gone as fast as it appeared. He scratched his neck too hard, and she saw a spreading stain of blood under his skin.
"What the hell—"
He looked at her and held up his corded, scab-laced arms. The skin peeled and blistered as if he'd stuck them into hot coals. Deep crimson patches covered his exposed skin, growing into each other and raising white vesicles on his face, the backs of his hands, his neck.
"What's happening to you?"
He held his hands out to her. "I think you are," he said in a deadly earnest whisper. "Are you doing this to me on purpose, Ms. Orozco?"
"I didn't do anything—" But in the same breath, she knew it was true. Her heat burned him, and now it burned her. She felt her pores opening up like mouths and screaming chemicals at him. She saw her own crimson, blistering skin and knew he was doing the same to her. When she looked at him, she gasped, and forgot what she'd been saying, or how to say it.
The deep indigo light made a lustrous mane of shadows around his face. He rolled his massive shoulders and stretched, blisters all over him ruptured, and fresh waves of him enveloped her. His chest swelled, bones straining into new architectures, muscles rippling like blood-mad anacondas. His eyes rolled in panic, terrified of the power that wielded him.
The forest blurred and vanished in the warring walls of pheromone fog they made. The raw, roaring vitality of him spoke through his flesh, leaving him as helpless and confused as she. "What's happening to us?"
"It's not all bad," she said, and kissed him.
Sparks danced between their lips before they touched. When they did, she felt as if her mouth were melting into his, and his fearsome wanting forced itself into her and fired her own lust to devour and be consumed.
She pulled back from him, heart in her throat. What was this, some kind of endogenous date-rape drug? What was he doing to her? What was
her body
doing to her? She was in heat, like a bitch. Was it loneliness, was it shock, driving her instinctively to drag another one inside her to fill the void?
Sex never meant much to Stella, even less than love. She'd let it happen once or twice to satisfy her curiosity, and dismissed it as one more trap that would mean death, if she let it get her.
It had her now. Her breasts ached. She felt herself growing wet, her pelvis churned and her faced burned with shame. Her insides felt as if they were liquefied, spinning, boiling under her skin. Nerves she never knew she had swam to the surface and tasted the air. The electrical surge of NOW melted memory, annihilated the future. Surely, this was what he meant by losing what it meant to be human. And he didn't seem to be coping with it any better than she was.
She had only been perverse for the sake of trying to upset him before, but now she wondered if she hadn't meant it. Was it such a bad thing, to stop being human?
He shuddered, holding himself in check and desperately avoiding her eyes. His face contorted, setting up tsunami waves that rippled through his torso, leaving the muscles in strange new configurations. He terrified her, and she almost ran, but then his gaze locked hers, his pupils so dilated his eyes were black mirrors in which she saw herself.
She flew to him. Her lips were blistered, the new skin growing in shingled and coarse, like a cat's tongue. Her mouth touched and tore at the tender flesh under his jaw, where a ruff of crimson-dripping feathers grew, and felt his teeth at her own pulse. She tasted the labyrinthine essence of his alkaline sweat, felt his stampeding pulse quickening in vulnerable arteries just millimeters beneath her teeth and barbed tongue. They could kill each other instantly, if they gave in to instinct, tearing out each other's throats like rabid wolves.
His hands on her described fiery trails and raised chills that drove her flesh mad with changes. He caressed her back, tracing her new and improved spine down to her flank, traversed and darted down the front of her pants to cup the engorged orchid of her sex.
It was furry with thousands of quills, stiffened hair-needles that raised a shower of dancing blood droplets from his fingers and palm. "What's with the mixed signals?"
"Hurry, before it grows teeth," she said. She tore his shirt off. Underneath, his skin had gone purple and black and crazed with sharp shark-skin radulae. He changed colors. The sores on his back glowed violet, then emerald and gold and rose crept in, and the pigments mingled and strobed hypnotic counterpoint to their entrained heartbeats in a breathtaking mating display.
She stroked his chest down to his groin. Her fingers turned back and rubbed his new skin the wrong way. Two of her fingertips sheared off to the bone. It felt
good
. Her skin burned. Bubbles streamed up the interior walls of her skull. Her lymph nodes swelled.
"I'm trying not to hurt you," she purred, touching him. His skin sizzled and went silvery-white where her blood flowed.
"Stop trying—" he groaned, and pulled her to him. He hoisted her up to his mouth. His exoskeleton shredded off her shirt and cut into her breasts. Her blood melted the brittle edges, cooked his skin and burned its way into him.
Their immune systems were at war. They were reacting to each other's formidable arrays of pheromonal triggers as hostile antigens, and their bodies were making ever more formidable defenses against each other. But their bodies had also driven them together, in spite of their fear, their loneliness, and their mistrust.
He rolled onto his back, and she fell on him, nipping his neck again and again until he bit her back. Her hands went down to his undefended crotch and ripped away his flimsy cotton pants. Flashing unpleasant memories of Sergeant Avery, the mutant rapist with his monster-cock. She recoiled. Avery's body reflected his fucked-up mind. He needed to destroy everything he touched, so he made his genitalia into a weapon. What was inside Storch commanded her body to react with desire, but to the changes, he was only another invader.