Coven (41 page)

Lydia whirled.

—
Lydia! You’re
back!

One of the bigger sisters faced her, naked
and grinning. Lydia gaped at the sight. The sister’s eyes were huge
spheres. Her stretching grin showed a mouth crammed with teeth. And
worse was what stood directly behind her: the same holotype that
had been reserved for Lydia earlier. When it recognized her, it
flexed up on its stout legs and howled.

Lydia was shaking, stepping back. The sister
and her escort stepped forward. The holotype’s meaty face pinched
up in lust.

—
I can’t wait to
watch
, the sister said.

Lydia didn’t need to be told what she meant.
The holotype’s preposterous genitals were already swelling in
arousal.

They backed her into a dead end. The
holotype fondled itself to full erection, chuckling deep from its
slatted throat.

Now or never,
Lydia thought. She raised the ultraviolet spotter,
aimed its purple bulb at the sister’s face, and flicked the
switch.

The sister giggled.

Nothing happened.

—

CHAPTER 36

The sisters hustled Wade out of the
Supremate’s nave. Besser seemed amused by Wade’s colossal
disappointment.

“
In a sense, Wade, the
Supremate is God. He’s omnipotent, omnipresent, and forethoughtful
to a higher goal.”

“
God, my ass,” Wade
complained. “If that fucker’s God, my favorite beer is Bud. God is
not a
black box.”

Besser stopped a moment.
His voice hung in the air like an incantation. “
My
god is here, Wade. Where’s
yours?”

Good question,
Wade concluded. He could not contemplate an
answer. In a fraction of a second, Wade thought about his whole
life, and how he’d blown every chance at being a decent person.
God, whoever or whatever He was, had abandoned him. Even Wade could
admit that it was fitting.

“
Here we are,” Besser said.
“Your last stop as a human being.”

Wade nearly wailed. The sign read
IMPLANTATIONSURGERY.

The sisters dragged him into a small hold
and slammed him down on a levslat, beside which hung a tray of
instruments: pincers, retractors, and a good old Planet
Earth type scalpel.

“
Before you can join the
Supremate’s family, you must first undergo a few changes.” Besser
picked up a tiny black needle with wires coming out of it. “This is
a ganglionicstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenode. It will
integrate you with the labyrinth’s sensor systems, and it will
teach you obedience very quickly. Any thought contrary to the
Supremate will trigger an instantaneous release of static
electrical current into your central nervous system and, of course,
your gonads.”

“
How charming,” Wade
remarked.

“
Additional acclimations
will embellish your immune system so that, barring any physical
accident, you’ll be impervious to all disease, and you won’t
age.”

Wade indicated the black needle. “What
exactly are you going to do with that?”

“
Exactly? We’re going to
implant it into your brain.”

Wade struggled against the two sisters, who
giggled at his horror. “My health plan doesn’t cover this kind of
procedure. You better find yourself another guy.”

One sister approached the instrument tray.
The other held Wade down on the table. He jerked, and punched her
in the eye with all his might, then howled. It felt like he’d just
punched a steel ball.

“
Be brave, Wade,” Besser
consoled. “The sisters know exactly what to do. They’re trained
brain surgeons.”

“
Oh, that makes me feel a
whole lot better!” Wade yelled.

The first sister vised his neck down with
her hand like an iron brace. The second sister picked up the
scalpel.

“
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?”

“
Yeah, you stick the key in
the hole and we’re out of here.”

“
Not quite. They’re
programmed by thought, level to level. But the only way we can
leave is through the main point access.”

“
So? Let’s go there and
split.”

“
Wade, every warren and
hall, every extromitter, every
everything
in this place has a sensor
in it. Eyes and ears. The Supremate knows where we are and what
we’re trying to do.”

Wade’s enthusiasm plummeted.

“
And you can bet your
Corvette,” she went on, “right now the Supremate is ordering every
sister in the place to the main point access, to keep us from
leaving.”

“
Besser said most of the
sisters were terminated.”

“
Most, or all?”

Wade gulped. “Most,” he
remembered. This was getting too complicated, like the trig and
literature courses he’d gotten untold D’s in. He didn’t want to be
confused with facts—he wanted
out.
“So the sisters are waiting for us at the
exit?”

“
Yes,” Lydia
clarified.

“
Use the
spotter.”

“
The spotter’s
battery powered, and it’s already getting low.”