Heat (71 page)

“Hey, baby,” she called, reaching the top of the stairs.

“Hey.” Gavin was bent by the reels, his scruffy grey hair hiding his face as he made some last-minute splice. He finished whatever he was doing (the job of projectionist was as foreign and as specialist to Tammy’s mind as that of neural surgeon) and then looked up at her. “Going home?”

“Thought I might hang out here for a while.” Tammy plucked at the clip-on bowtie that the theatre made her wear and smiled at him, blushing.

Gavin grinned briefly and slid off his high stool. “Thought so, huh? Go sit down, baby, I’ll be with you in a sec.”

Tammy went to the weathered old couch, shrugging out of her vest on the way, but not her shirt. Gavin liked her boobs, but she hated to be even a little naked in front of him. There wasn’t much light up here, but there was enough to see her fat. Besides, he liked to take her shirt off himself.

Gavin checked the films, loaded a reel for Indiana Jones, and came back to her. His hand went up her shirt almost the same instant his ass touched the sagging cushions and Tammy got the giggles again.

“Don’t be so quick,” she said, pushing playfully at his arm.

“Aw, come on, don’t be so frigid.” Gavin pawed at her through her bra and then started unhooking it. “Why do you got to wear such complicated shit?” he grumbled.

Tammy tried to kiss him and Gavin stuck his tongue all the way down her throat, which was gross. She pulled back and he opened up her shirt and started sucking at her boob, kneading and rubbing the other one.

“Come on,” he panted. “Come on, come on. Touch it already.”

Tammy put her hand on his crotch and felt the solid lump pushing out the front of his jeans. Touching it made her feel that shivery spike in her own…place. She wriggled on the couch cushions, petting him nervously. She knew he’d put it in her, but there was always this excitement, the newness and wrongness of it, that made her hesitate. That was okay. Gavin seemed to like pushing her into it every time.

“Yeah, that’s it, that’s it, baby. Come on, get your hand in there.”

Shaking a little, Tammy unzipped his jeans and slid her hand under the waist of his shorts. She gripped his thing, feeling it hot and rubbery, and he groaned and sucked harder at her boobs.

They petted like that for a while, Tammy getting hotter and hotter while Gavin’s hands got rougher and his thing got harder. Soon, he’d put it in her and maybe that shivery pee would happen. Maybe it wouldn’t, but it would still feel nice.

Gavin’s watch beeped and he groaned and got up. Holding his jeans up with one hand, his thing poking out over the open zipper, he went off to change a reel and check the other screens. Tammy waited for him, twisting her hands in the open folds of her shirt. She was flushed and breathing hard, but it was a great feeling all the same. Like being sexy and pretty and thin, all the things she’d never been and never would be. (It hadn’t yet occurred to Tammy that ‘fooling around’ five nights a week was a better workout than she’d ever stuck to before and that thinking about the things they did in the projectionist’s bay had replaced most, if not entirely all, of her daily snacks. She’d lost twenty pounds so far, and if she ever got around to noticing it, she might realize that she was at least beginning to be a little sexy for real.)

When Gavin came back, he didn’t sit down. He got up close to the sofa, pushing his jeans down to his knees, and said, “Come on, baby.”

Tammy’s excitement curdled slightly. “No. Come on. I don’t want to.”

“Come on, just do it. Don’t be such a fucking cow.”

Tammy’s eyes and stomach dropped. She tugged her shirt over her hanging boob, the heat in her cheeks turning ugly. “No,” she mumbled.

“Hey, don’t do that. Baby, I’m just playing, you know me.” He shook her shoulder as though he were waking her up from a nap but he didn’t look like he was playing, not at all. “Just do it,” he whined. “You might like it. Most girls do. Come on! You do it for me and I’ll do it for you.”

His thing jutted, swollen and purple, right in front of her face. It smelled sweaty and gross.

“Come on, I thought you were a fun girl,” he said, looking frustrated.

She knew that look. He was close to just stomping off, letting her walk down to the bus station by herself and that would be it for the night. This was a fight they’d had before, and Tammy didn’t know how many times they could keep having it before he gave up on her for real. The thought was more terrible than she could stand.

“Oh, all right,” she said. “But you can’t, you know, in my mouth. Promise you’ll take it out.”

“Girls like that!” he insisted.

“Promise, or I’m not doing it!”

“Okay, fine. Jesus. Just do it!”

After several false starts, Tammy opened her mouth and queasily licked at the knobby head of his thing. It tasted like sucking on a sweaty hand. She tried to make a face and back off, but Gavin grabbed her head and pushed it all the way in. She gagged and he pulled back, but soon he was pushing it in again.

It was gross. That was all there was for Tammy, but he was groaning like it was the best thing in the world. Tammy didn’t have to do much, just suck at him a little, and she did, hating it but knowing he would put it in her pretty soon and then it would be worth it.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, baby, oh that’s great. Suck it, baby.”

Her cheeks flamed. None of the books she read—books with names like
Forbidden Desires
and
Highland Rogue
—ever had men say things like that. It always made her feel a little bad, kind of sick and dirty, the way the churchies had always insisted that any girl who did this sort of thing really was. She wished he’d talk nice to her once in a while, like the books did.

“Suck it, baby! Suck it! Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!”

She felt his thing twitch in her mouth and she yanked back fast. His white stuff shot out a second later, squirting out on the couch cushions.

“Goddammit!” Gavin hollered, and raised his hand like he wanted to hit her.

“You promised!” she shouted back. “I told you to pull it out and you promised!”

He still looked pissed, but his fist uncurled. “Girls like it,” he said. “It’s the best part. You’re such a fucking baby sometimes.” He stomped off, zipping his fly up, to check the reels and the screens.

Tammy waited, her anger drifting into the threat of tears. She got a handful of napkins from the employee’s table and used it to clean the couch. Maybe girls did like it. In the books she read, sometimes the girls did that for the hero and they liked it. Of course, the books didn’t say how gross and sweaty it tasted.

When Gavin came back, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Aw, it’s all right,” he said, only looking a little pissed now. “You’ll do better next time, right?”

“Sure.”

“Sure you will.” He sat down and groped at her boobs, forgiving her.

She let him play with her, gradually coming back to a little of the good, gushy mood he made her feel, until he was panting at her to touch him again. She did, rubbing his thing in her fist the way he’d taught her until he finally started to get hard. He was groaning at her to hurry up as he slobbered at her nipples, and she tried, pulling and rubbing faster.

Finally, he was sticking right up again and Gavin pulled at her pants and panties, shoving her down into the couch. She gasped as he climbed on her, as his thing finally got inside her to that tickly heat. She lay excited and nervous, wondering if this would be one of
those
times, as Gavin humped and humped at her.

His watch beeped.

“Oh fuck!” he groaned, but he didn’t stop. He was humping faster, rocking the whole couch, and that shivery feeling was growing. “Hurry up, hurry up!”

She giggled. There was nothing she could do about it. But her giggles became a gasp as
it
happened. That tiny little shiver crawled up to her belly and blossomed, making her glow all over, making her need to pee so much.

Then Gavin grunted in her ear and squeezed off another soapy spurt inside her. Gross. He was off her at once, fumbling his jeans up as he ran for the reel that needed changing.

Too late. Tammy saw the window to one of the auditoriums go white even as Gavin ran to it, which meant the reel had run out and the people in the audience (all six or eight of them) were even now looking around and getting honked off. It was just too bad if they wanted refunds, because the money was all locked up for the night.

“Ah fuck!” Gavin cried. He snatched up the new reel and then leaned in toward the auditorium window and dropped it again.

The canister banged like a gun and film came spitting out. Tammy jumped up with a cry of sympathetic dismay, but Gavin didn’t even seem to care. His mouth was moving, but he wasn’t saying anything. He stumbled back, his face washed out and staring.

“What’s wrong?” Tammy asked. She pulled her shirt shut and hugged herself small. “Gavin?”

“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fuck.” Gavin looked at her, his eyes huge. He was shaking. “Stay there.”

Tammy huddled on the couch, fear and confusion fighting for control of her. “What’s wrong?” she asked again. Her voice cracked on the second word.

“Just stay there, baby. Don’t move. Don’t…don’t make a sound, okay?” Gavin staggered across the projectionist’s bay to another screen. He leaned into the window, shading his eyes. “Jesus,” she heard him whisper. He reached out and slapped at the up-lights, flooding the auditorium with light even though the movie was still running. “Oh sweet baby Jesus.” His voice slid up shrill and unsteady. He looked a hundred years old.

Tammy felt herself get up without giving herself any conscious order to do so. She walked down the bay to
Raiders of the Lost Ark
on legs she couldn’t even feel.

On screen, Harrison Ford was frantically spraying cobras with gasoline and she couldn’t seen anything below but a few dozen people quietly watching from their seats. Then the scene changed to the desert, lighting up the place like a sun, and Tammy could see blood. Blood in rivers. Blood in falls. Blood painting the back of every chair where a person sat.

She waited to faint, but she didn’t. She didn’t think she could. She heard Gavin run across the bay and into the manager’s office, heard him rattling at the phone and then screaming into it. She couldn’t even wonder who he was calling. She couldn’t feel anything, not even fear.

So much blood.

T
agen heard running feet in his dreams before the hammering at his door finished killing his sleep. He bolted up from the bed, grabbing his plasma gun and aiming it just as Daria burst in.

“We’ve got to go right now!” she told him, and then skidded to a stop and stared at the weapon in his hand.

The suddenness of her halt made him think for one horrible instant that he had fired. He uncurled his thumb from the killing switch with excruciating slowness and put the gun down. Only then did he breathe, folding forward and covering his face with his hands, breathing deep and slow until his heart had calmed.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I need to put that damned thing away somewhere.” He spoke against his palms, muffling the words, but then looked up at her. “What has happened?”

“Someone broke into a movie theater in Hillmark and killed every single person in the building,” she replied. “They’re not saying how, but they’re saying more than fifty people died.”

“At once?” Tagen pushed himself off the bed and grabbed for his clothing. “How? How could even E’Var do such a thing?” The idea that the prisoner might have acquired a neural stunner during his escape came to Tagen for the first time, freezing him in place. The pilots who manned prison transporters were not supposed to go armed—the best means of preventing prisoners from taking one’s weapons was still not to carry them—but it was a policy that had seen a lot of bending over the years, and even though the stunners were no good against a Jotan prisoner, they were just as effective against the occasional Kevrian raider as they were against humans. “Were they sleeping?” he asked cautiously.

“No, but…I don’t think you understand. Movie theaters are like buildings with huge TV screens in them,” Daria was saying. “They’re dark and noisy, and I think it’s completely plausible that he just went from person to person and killed them all without anyone even noticing. And even if someone did scream or something, he’d only have to wait until someone in the movie was screaming, too. You’ve seen some of our movies. There can be a lot of screaming.”

He shook his head, not refuting her but unable to accept her argument. “But how could he know that? How could he know even what a…movie theater…was?”

“I don’t know,” Daria said. “But I know Hillmark is only thirty miles from here. The TV says they only found the bodies an hour ago. Your guy might still be in the area.”

“And you will take me there?”

She blinked rapidly, seeming surprised. “Of course,” she said.

“You are not afraid?”

She laughed at him. “I’m terrified. Are you coming or not?”

Tagen stepped forward and pulled her against him, feeling her hands come up and grip at his back, feeling the tension in her small body. She
was
terrified. And she was still going with him. “Thank you,” he said, stroking down the soft fall of her hair. He squeezed her lightly and stood away, taking up his supply pack. “Lead me.”

She went ahead of him down the stairs and out the door. There she paused and came back. She moved past Tagen to the kitchen and brought down two tins of the cat’s food. Grendel was there at his dish in an instant, miawing anxiously as she filled it. She touched the animal’s head as he dove in, and then she came away again.

“Leave the door open, Tagen,” she said, as she moved past him and outside again. “Just in case, you know, I don’t come back. For a while.”

His brave human.

Tagen left the door ajar and followed her down the groundcar. She stared straight ahead as she strapped herself down and her eyes were dry. In her face, he saw the looming possibility of danger, of death, but he also saw a determination to face it.