Decay Inevitable (40 page)

“You first,” she said. She followed his lead.

After they had snorted a couple of lines each, Derek pushed her back against the sofa. He unbuckled his jeans and let them fall to the floor.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked. He was wearing white cotton boxer shorts that hugged his hips. The outline of his cock was obvious. It made a long, vague S-shape.

“Do you like what you see?” he asked. “Would you like to see more?”

She nodded.

“Then you have to take something off too.”

She unzipped the dress and let it slip off her shoulders. The coke had made her feel tingly at the back of her brain, as if she was being tickled by a feather there. It was hard to keep control of herself. Derek’s fingers slipped into the waistband of his boxers. His eyes were fixed on her nipples, which were visible through the sheer fabric of her bra. Susannah’s nipples, Susannah’s breasts. Small, perky breasts; very pink, very stiff nipples. He failed to see the slight failure of her right hand, which morphed for a fraction into the gnarled fist of the guard she had attacked at Gleave’s hideout.
Get a grip
, she ordered herself.
Concentrate
.

She wondered whose pudenda she should present to him. Susannah’s was a tight, pink, neat affair, the blonde pubic hair trimmed, the mons moisturised and scented. The nurse from Sloe Heath had a sex that was looser and more hairy, but shockingly carnal in a way that Susannah’s was not. Perhaps she should offer her own. She felt a flood of warmth through her loins, and an almost unbearable heat that gave her a melting feeling in her stomach.

Derek slipped the waistband down over his cock, which sprang lightly away from its nest of hair. It was thick and heavy, not yet fully erect, and it bounced to the rhythm of his heartbeat. It was different to the guard’s, or the pictures she had seen. A sheath of skin covered the glistening core. She was about to ask him what it was, but remembered Mick’s retreat. She must feign some sass, some knowledge.

Derek dabbed half the remaining coke from the mirror onto his finger. He smeared it onto the tip of his cock and leaned over to kiss her. She moved back under the weight of his mouth as it melded with her own. His tongue tasted of rum and Coca-Cola. This
was
like the pictures in Jonathan’s magazine. The stories too. She made a low noise in the back of her throat and reached down to caress his balls. She had read this in a reader’s letter: Marge from Crewe. She squeezed lightly, aware that the organ needed to be treated tenderly. Derek closed his eyes and hissed.

Now she moved her hand so it encircled his cock. She lightly moved the outer skin against the stiffening core until the prepuce peeled back from the head, swollen and tan and glossy.

“Put your mouth on it,” Derek said, his voice thick. He had his hands under the frame of her bra and was massaging her breasts, rolling the nipples between his fingers. It felt good. The tickle at the back of her brain increased and spread. It linked up directly with the V between her legs. If he didn’t rub her there soon, she would have to touch herself. It was almost unbearable.

She slid down on the sofa until his cock was level with her mouth. She saw the pictures in the magazine and gently enclosed the head with her mouth, moving her head slowly down the shaft until his balls were flush with her lips. He gasped.

“Nobody did that before,” he said. “Nobody took the lot. What are you? Linda Lovelace?”

She ignored him; she didn’t know what he was talking about. She continued to suck, remembering the pictures, remembering to keep her hand moving on the base of his cock, remembering to keep it wet, keep it moving, keep it moving. Never let up. He began to tense. She remembered the magazine. The readers’ letters. Rhiannon from Newcastle. He began to jerk and she moved her hand underneath him, between the hard, muscled curves of his buttocks. The tip of his cock began to pulse and spasm – she had read about this too – and she slid her forefinger deep into his anus. He cried out and rammed into her mouth. She felt his come, so much of it, too much of it, jet against the back of her throat and she gagged. She pulled away and he fell back against the sofa cushions.

“Me now,” she said, wiping her mouth.

“I’m knackered, babe,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Me now.”

“Tomorrow. Let’s get some kip.”

“
No
,” she said. Something in her voice made Derek’s eyes snap open. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want it all. I want you to suck my clit and fuck me every way there is.”

He knelt before her. His cock was ebbing, dwindling, its tip endowed with a pearl of come. The sight of her pale, smooth thighs didn’t resurrect it. Neither did her pink, liquid core as she yanked off her knickers and spread her legs. Her cunt yawned before him.

“This doesn’t feel right,” he said.

“Put some of that powder on it,” she demanded. “That coko. Put some on.”

“The music needs changing.”

She clamped his head with her calves and, leaning forwards, pressed a fingernail against the bridge of his nose. “Do. It.”

Derek collected the dregs of the coke from the mirror and rubbed it into her lips. Cheke gasped and screwed her eyes shut. She clenched her buttocks and thrust her crotch up against his fingers.

“Easy, girl,” Derek said. He continued to rub, his wet fingers slithering against her clitoris, slipping up her cunt, or sliding against her anus. He changed the rhythm and pace, the depth of his strokes. Cheke was crying with pleasure. He leaned forwards and covered her vulva with his mouth. Cheke’s eyes flew open. She reached out and grabbed Derek’s hair, pressed him deeper into the soft, hot centre of herself, a place where she no longer seemed to hold any sway, a place that didn’t appear to have any substance or structure any more. Waves of heat were rolling deep inside her. She locked her heels behind his back and squeezed him deeper. It wasn’t enough. She needed him inside her. She pulled him up alongside her and began working his spent cock with her hand. Nothing was happening.

“Fuck me,” she whispered to him.

“I can’t,” he said. “The beer. The coke. I’m done in.”

She forced his cock against her and pressed with her fingers, trying to nudge the flaccid tip between her lips. Again, she locked her heels at the small of his back and dug down. “Come on,” she said. “Come
on
.”

“Susannah, you’re hurting me. What’s the rush?
Susannah
?” He grunted and his eyes bulged. He lifted his chin off her chest and tried to speak but only tiny noises were bursting from the back of his throat.

She felt his pelvis pulverise under the persistent crush of her feet. “You fucker,” she said. “You miserable fucker.”

She let herself come through.

Cheke watched Derek’s eyes, hazy with pain, as her body changed beneath him. The puckered mouths emerged through the taut flesh of Susannah’s torso and gulped at him. Her own cunt grew and broadened until it trembled beneath Derek’s shattered groin.

“Give me what I need,” she said, and sank him into her. Before too long, Derek was unable to say anything, even if his mouth had been able to form the words. The blood, so much of it, could only get out of him that way.

H
ER INDUSTRY WAS
not to be questioned, surely, and she had done well so far, or so she thought. Gleave came to her at the house, stepping through the drying waste of the hallway with the look of a man who had just found a hank of hair in his soup. She had been warned of his arrival; her inner eye, recalling the previous night’s excesses, had been interrupted. She envisioned Gleave’s car sweeping into the street, saw his grey face press up against the window pane as the neighbouring houses rushed by. There had been enough time to change: another of Susannah’s black dresses, sleeveless, short, generous around the bust. In the mirror she checked her colouring and sucked out a deep, plummy colour from the palette of mouths in her memory, dusted her cheekbones with the hint of blush Jonathan had sported when she took off her robe in front of them, before he understood what was happening to him.

“What are you doing?” Gleave asked when they were seated in the living room. Cheke had left one of Jonathan’s magazines open on the coffee table in the hope that Gleave would see. She wanted him to do to her what the men in the pictures were doing. She wanted to do to him what the women were doing. The more she did it, the closer she would come to knowing the secrets. Maybe in this way she would understand what normal was. What it meant to be human, to be a woman.

“I thought you’d like to see me being less unusual.”

Gleave took something from his pocket and sat down on the sofa next to her. He trawled the fingers of his other hand through his soft, white hair.

“Do you like me like this?” she asked. She said: “Can I call you Daniel?”

Gleave turned and smiled savagely at her. “No, you cannot call me fucking Daniel,” he snarled. He showed her what was in his hand: a canister that fit snugly in his palm. He flipped off the lid and sprayed the contents full in her face. He calmly replaced the lid and slid the canister back into his pocket. Then he stood up and clasped his large, soft hands in front of his greatcoat, watching her all the while.

“I think,” he said, “that it’s time you understood what pain is.”

Cheke blinked at him. She brushed away the spray from her eyes and waited for him to go on. She was not yet aware that half of her face had come away with her fingers.

“Pain is master, anywhere you look in the animal kingdom,” Gleave said. “So it is with us.” He spotted an errant hair on his cuff and tweezered it off with his elegant fingers. He removed his lenses and polished them on a white handkerchief which he then folded precisely and kept in his palm. “I thought you were aware of the job you had to do for us,” he said at last.

“I am,” Cheke wanted to say, but the words would not form, in the same way they had failed in the seconds after she was withdrawn from her resting place. The word
am
didn’t have any closure about it. It drifted on instead:
ahhh
. Drool glazed her chin. She felt for her mouth and there was no bottom lip for the top one to shut against. As if triggered by this ghastly discovery, a flood of heat wound tightly around her lower jaw. She made a gagging sound and dropped to her knees.

“You will know pain,” Gleave said. “Maybe that’s where we went wrong at the start. We should have tied you to your job with the threat of pain. You must not underestimate us, Cheke. We need you, but there are others. Do as you are told and then we can discuss your rehabilitation.”

He stepped towards her suddenly and she flinched. Gleave smiled. “It’s good that you are afraid of me. Good that there is something to scare you. Fear is an ally. It will help you to stay alive.

“Now... open wide. Godspeed, my angel.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
O
NE:
A T
HIEF IN THE
N
IGHT

S
HE GAVE HIM
hell, and then some. She forced him to wear a saddle and carry her around the blistered chambers of the theatre. Together, they explored the areas beneath the stage, cluttered rooms filled with thespian paraphernalia that was now wreathed with permanent smoke ghosts, all detail sealed black by the long-spent flames. There were uniformed mannequins that had once stood in for warring hordes as a backdrop to some military drama or other; deep wooden chests stuffed with costumes; scorched stacks of plays tied up with string. Everything had a wafery feel to it; the rooms had not known moisture for decades. An hour of stalking through these secret rooms with Sadie on his back gave him a furious thirst. If that wasn’t bad enough, the thing that was developing in Sadie’s external womb had begun to teethe. It chattered and ground its new gnashers in his ear as he negotiated the maze of thoroughfares beneath the stage and the auditorium. He caught glimpses of it in the corner of his eye as it twisted and grinned like some malformed specimen pickled in formaldehyde.

Sadie liked to ride him naked. She liked it better when he had his shirt off too. She bounced around as he galloped through these catacombs, a nightmarish Godiva and steed, pulling at his hair to turn him left or right. When he was allowed to reduce his speed, he padded along, breathing hard, checking the progress of his strange disease as it turned his limbs black. The infection was reaching a critical stage, he saw. His flesh and bones were becoming as pulpy as overripe bananas. These parts – his shoulder, the lower portion of his arm – had been digested by the monster in its sac via some supernatural method of ingestion. Something was going to give soon. He wished it hurt more. To simply see his body failing like this without even the remotest twinge made him feel inhuman, unreal. He knew he existed at some level in the world of the living, but any dignity he might have had here was being literally stripped away.

“Cherub will be on solids before long,” Sadie commented blithely, as if she were relaying to him the price on a tin of carrots.

He would kill himself, he decided, coolly. If Joanna had forgotten about him or the infection looked likely to incapacitate him, he would end it somehow. And he would try to find some way of taking the bitch and her fucking demon child with him.

S
HE COULDN’T DREAM
of anything else, she found. And it was strange, but whenever she settled on an aspect of it, her mind, unbidden, tossed her little nuggets of information. It must have been a result of the trauma of her accident, she thought, a jolting of her brain that meant it spewed out facts at every possible opportunity. It was as if her imagination had been given a power surge.

This man, for example, with his brown curly hair and hurt expression. Big brown eyes. He looked lost and lonely. And, without digging for it:

His name is Will
.

“Oh really?” she whispered.

“Chick?” Her husband leaned over her.

His name is Harry
. She giggled.