Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten (53 page)

“What’da’ya think you’ll do?” I asked just to keep the conversation flowing, so that any unwarranted ears wouldn’t suspect.  We didn’t want to give the impression we meant anything else.  Those spying ears needed to take what we were saying at face value.

“I have no choice, Eff.  I have to leave and ride things out someplace else.  You know Uncle Pablo, he won’t do shit.  I’m fucked one way or another with these fucking
NIA assholes crawling up my bunghole.”

Which meant – he was going to stay put, our uncles were up to something and that, for the time being, he had shaken free of the government Shock Troopers.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to see you anytime soon,”
he went on as I continued to translate.  What he really meant in my head. 
“So, if anything happens, you’re most likely on your own for now, Estefan.”

Translation: “See you soon and we’re going to have help – a lot of it.”

“Are things still bad on the streets?” I asked, trying to get a feel for what he knew, since I had been cooped up in my house for the past few days.

“Naw.”

This was an emphatic “yes”.

“How’s the neighborhood holding up?” I continued.

“It’s pretty good, now that you mention it.  Everyone seems to have weathered this sporadic, ill-planned storm without much loss.”

I felt my eyes roll back in my head as the true import of his words was realized across my consciousness.  The raid by the NIA had been horrific, systematic, and left many dead in its wake.  I wondered just how many had died just because something, from the heavens, had fallen upon them and changed them forever more.  T
hey had no choice in the matter, something they couldn’t taste or smell, entirely invisible to them, was changing them.  True, they would transform into beings unlike any other to walk the earth, but fuck, did they deserve to die? 
Did I or Katie or Ramona deserve to be slaughtered?

“I think I’m going to go now, Eff.  I have a lot of things I still have to figure out.  I will try and contact you in a few weeks,”
muttered my cousin.  Like I said, he was a master at disguising the fact he was lying through his teeth.  He’d just told me a plan was already in place and he would be getting back to me soon.  Maybe The Uncles had a way to get all of us out of Dodge and somewhere safe, before we ended shot through the head.  Maybe… it was a faint hope, but it was something.  It was a hell of a lot more than I had when I’d fallen asleep an hour earlier.

“Ok, Jake… good luck,” was all I could think of to say.

“Thanks, cuz, I’m going to need every last bit of it.” 
He even sounded on edge, just that tab bit frightened, giving total credence to what he was saying.  The opposite, of course, meant he was confident with what was going on - whatever it was.  He was trying to placate my nerves.

He cut the line.  My cell phone went dead in my ear.  My cousin Jacob was
alive
and quite well, or so it would seem.

I took the smart device from my head and glanced over at Ramona.  I was startled to see both Katie and Tirza sitting on the bed beyond my girlfriend.  All three of them gazed through the semi-darkness with hope and anxiety mixing their expressions.

“Well?” prompted Ramona, seeing my surprise over the presence of the other girls. She couldn’t wait any longer.  She wanted an explanation of the phone call.

I let my eyes meet hers and couldn’t help the smile.  I felt it spread across my face, broad and boyish with glee.  “Jacob’s alive!” I said as quiet as I could manage, though I wanted to exclaim into the night.  Even then, my voice was somewhat loud in the confines of the Loft.

“You are shitting me?” asked Katie over Ramona’s shoulder.

I just smiled like a clown, my head on a swivel – the ubiquitous negative.

Tirza’s eyes never left my face.  From across the bed, I could tell she was glad for me.

Ramona leaned back, using one arm to support her.  “Leave it to, Jacob, to get out of the shit without a single s
kidmark on his tighty-whiteys,” she murmured, shaking her head not unlike I’d just done a few minutes before.

“He got away… even after being shot at like a thousand times, the motherfucken cockroach got away,” I repeated, still amazed by my cousins ability to worm his way out of seemingly hopeless situations.

All three of the girls chuckled quietly.

“Did he say anything else?” wondered Katie aloud, crawling across the bed on all fours, coming closer to me and my girlfriend.

Tirza stayed where she was.  She gathered her legs underneath her, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the foot of the bed, her hands in her lap, fingers twiddling.

“Yeah, he did,” I began, and then explained the details of our childhood game.  “So, by sticking the rules of the game, Jacob was able to
tell me in code, he was safe.  He was with our uncles Juan and Roberto, and they are working on a plan that might be able to help us all.  And, that’s the most important thing of all.”

“Wait!” interrupted Tirza, which sort of caught us all off guard.

We all turned toward her.

“Jacob is with your uncle Juan?” she continued
, the ire and aversion already seeping into her tone.  “Juan Marquez?”

“Yes, Teezee, he is,” I answered reluctantly, already knowing where this was going.

The other two teenage girls were looking back and forth between us, trying to figure out what was going on.

“He’s a fucking pervert, Estefan!” she accused.  Her
voice was loud.  It had to have carried down to the second story below us.

“Shit
, Tirza, would you keep your voice down!” I admonished, placing my hands face down before me, jockeying them up and down a few times.

“Sorry,” she said, almost at once, “but that still doesn
’t change the fact the asshole felt me up at your uncle’s wedding.”  She was standing now, a fist before her.  Her entire form was rigid with anger and defiance.

“What?!?” inquired Ramona, her question heavily laced with nausea.  Her eyes like fire when she gazed upon me.

God damn, girl, it wasn’t me that had groped Tirza’s tits!

I sighed hugely.  “It was some time ago, when Tirza and I were first going out.  My uncle Juan III married my aunt Susana back in 2014.  My uncle Juan Jr. somehow got Tirza alone, in a corner, and began grabbing at her for a few seconds, before she could get away.  He didn’t get the chance to do anything worse, but still knowing that fucker’s past, he would’ve if he had the chance.  Still though, my step-dad and Johan were so pissed off, they gave good ole Uncle Juan a nice beat down in the parking lot afterward.”  I gave Tirza a crooked smile.  She sort of grimaced, but eventually sat back down upon the bed.  “Tirza got one good kick in before we left him there, a little bloodier than he had been before…”  I trailed off into silence.

“Fuck, Eff, you think it’s a good idea to get help from your uncles?” asked Katie, her eyes wide and skittish.  “I mean, especially if one of them might be like a fucking rapist and shit.”

I shrugged.  “What other choice do we have - them or a
bullet in the head?  I just saying, because Jacob said the streets are running with fucking blood.  The NIA has flooded the entire neighborhood.  They are out to kill all Mutos on sight.”

“Choice or not, Estefan, if that fucker so much as looks at me the wrong way, I’m gonna slice his nutsack wide open with a butcher knife,” warned Tirza, moving closer to the rest of us.  The emphatic tone in her voice made Ramona giggle with appreciation.

Ramona had always gravitated toward tough bitches… even if they are rivals for my affection.  She didn’t care; she loved them all the same.

“I will make sure to warn him, Tirza,” I said, hoping to placate the woman in miniature, but knew it was an effort wrought in futility.  If Tirza didn’t like you, there was precious else one could do to change her mind.  She was sometimes the most stubborn person I had ever met, Leda included.

Her eyes flashed in the absence of light.  I knew what I had said hadn’t amounted to a three-foot shit pile.  If Uncle Juan Jr. tried something with her, he would most definitely pay for it.

“Estefan?” queried Katie after a few heartbeats.

“Yeah?”

“If ‘The Uncles’ are supposed to be so bad ass and all, how come they didn’t seek revenge on Uncle Enrique and Johan after they beat him up in the parking lot?”

No one ever said Katie was stupid.

I laughed, uncomfortably, and ran a hand
over my scalp.  “Probably because my Uncle Roberto put a penance on him,” I replied out of instinct.  It was a family thing.

“A penance?” asked my girlfriend.

“Yeah, exactly that,” I answered, nodding.  As I glanced around at the girls, I realized not one of them would know what I was talking about.  This was family terminology, our lexicon.  I tried to explain:

“Because Tirza was
my
girl at the time, she was considered off limits, a civilian so to speak.  Since my stepdad had always been on
their
good side,
this
distinction
had
to be honored.  When Uncle Juan overstepped that boundary, it was, in the eyes of my uncle Roberto, an offense punishable by penance.  Should one be dealt, and one was, there would be no form of retaliation allowed, because my uncle Juan had fucked up in the first place.  If Juan had come after my Stepdad or Johan, then he would’ve had to face Uncle Roberto…

“It’s actually kinda simple when you think about it,” I finished, surprised at my sudden smugness.

“But isn’t he younger?” asked Ramona tentatively.

I nodded.  “That doesn’t mean shit, Mona.”

“Why?”

“’Cuz no one fucks with Uncle Roberto.”

It was silent for nearly a minute, until:

“We should go to bed,” urged Katie, “we still have a
ton
of shit to figure out.”

“Yeah,” agreed Tirza.

“All of this crap is just getting way too weird,” commented Ramona, shaking her head in resignation.

“Well, that’s my family.”  It was the only phrase that encapsulated the situation as I knew it.

[Another pause.]

My family was so many odd things, all wrapped into one gigantic ball of good and bad, the righteous and the wicked locked in battle for all of time.  The complexity from which I originated was the wellspring of my ability to cope.  If I hadn’t witnessed so many undesirable things as a child, I don’t think I could’ve survived the months that followed.  I would’ve crawled up into a ball, on the floor, and gone insane...

[Another restart.]

We all made our ways back to our beds.  Within half an
hour, we were all fast asleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Summer – 2018)

Hurtful Past,
Confused Future

At 6 o’clock on the dot, later that morning, I was awakened by the blaring tones of the alarm on my cell phone.  They were the familiar beats and rhythms of an old school song everyone used to bump to when I was only two years old:

“Go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

“Go shorty, it’s yo birfday,

“We gonna party like it’s yo birfday,

“We gonna sip Bacardi like it’s yo birfday,

“And you know we don’t give a fuck, cuz that’s yo birfday…”

It was an old song, true, but, the fact I let it play for about half a minute before turning it off, was a testament to the talent of the rapper who had named himself after half a dollar’s worth of change.

I put the phone back on the nightstand and twisted on the bed, surveying the entire length of the Loft.  Ramona was sitting back against the headboard of my bed, rubbing at her eyes and fidgeting with her hair, her luscious tits about to flop out of her top.  The silken top had skewed downward and slightly to the right during her sleep.  Katie was stretching languorously on the far bed like she always did in the morning, and then rolled over so that she was facing me
directly.  Our eyes met and she blew me a kiss, which I returned.  She looked absolutely scrumptious laid out on that bed, naked underneath her nightclothes, rested and ready – at least to me, she looked ready.  Her smoky eyes gave her away.  The longer I stared, the more she grinned until her entire visage was sparkling with the naughty thoughts crossing her mind.  Naughty thoughts she knew I was reading from across the room. 
Come here, Estefan.  Come here and fuck me as hard and for as long as you want…

From the corner of my eye, I saw Tirza walk through the portal of the bathroom and out of sight.  I knew she was going to wash-up.  She had always been one to brush her teeth and wash her face the moment she awoke.  Having some sort of bad breath/gooey-eye phobia, it drove her to rid herself of the residue of sleep at the earliest opportunity. 
Some things never change.  She hasn’t… to this very day it’s the same thing with Tirza…

“It’s gotta be a little weird for you, huh Steve?” commented Ramona with a question, gazing at me through her eyebrows.  Her arms crossed
over her breasts, which she had put in their proper place beneath her sexy camisole.

“What’s that, my dear?” I asked, not really in the mood for her petty jealousies that could come and go in the blink of an eye.

“Seeing
her,
here, in your room, this early in the morning, it must bring back a flood of memories…,” she trailed off as if she were trying to tempt me to go there.

Like I said before, I didn’t want to waste time bandying stupid shit with her after everything we’d gone through the day before.  Sometimes my girlfriend’s comments just needed to be marginalized.  “Yeah, my love, it does,” was all I said as I crossed the room.  I walked past the half-closed bathroom door and came up to my cousin.  Katie, upon seeing my intent, stood at the foot of the bed, abruptly closing the distance between us.

Katie stood on the tips of her toes, her arms opening, letting me into her embrace.  I fell into her, my head bent downward as she upturned hers to meet mine.  It was a natural sort of ying and yang, coming together, culminating in a kiss.  My arms encircled her as our lips touched.  I was filled with such aching desire, it felt like I had stepped into an oven.   A searing heat flowed outward from my stomach, inflamed my lions and made my face flush.  I could feel a similar reaction from my cousin – the swell of her breasts pushed hard against me, the firm pressure of her pelvic bone along the middle of my growing cock and the almost frantic clutch of her hug.

“God, Estefan, you make me so fucking horny,” she mouthed around our kiss, her voice made husky and deep with lust.

I chuckled from the chest and whispered a long, drawn out, “Goooood,” but I didn’t stop.  I kept kissing my cousin.  I parted her lips with my tongue, which she immediately began to suck.  I let my hands fall to her firm butt cheeks and squeezed them hungrily, using the newfound leverage to grind thickness my dick into her pubis.  Her welcoming labium’s parted for me, through our pajamas – perfect.  I was pressed against her engorged clitoris.  She shuddered in my arms for a few moments then returned the pressure.  She twisted her hips a bit, so my penis was rubbing across her little nob of pleasure, back and forth with each twitch of the intimate portions of her body.  All the while, we kept kissing and kissing and kissing.

It was the sharp intake of breath and an astonished, “Oh my god!” that brought us both to reality like a splash of ice cold water.  We stiffened in each other’s grasp, our kiss broken, both of us turning to look in the direction of the voice - frozen in place.  My hands were still cupping Katie’s firm ass, while her own were digging into my bare shoulder blades, nails biting.  I hadn
’t worn a shirt that night.

It was Tirza, who had come from the bathroom in a rush, mostly likely thinking I was still on the other side of the room
, only to find me on the side she was facing, making out with my cousin.  I know we looked like we were two seconds from ripping off our clothes and going at it.

It was the moment of truth.  Either Tirza was going to accept the taboo of my intimate relationship with my first cousin or she was going to go ape-shit and blow the whole fucking thing to kingdom come.

Instead, she just stood there on the balls of her feet like a deer in the headlights, as immobile as us.  Her lower jaw was the only thing actually moving, in a weird sort of half-closing, half-opening rhythm.  It was strange to watch.   Was she unconsciously biting off word after word?   Was she in a state of flux unable to express herself?  She appeared animatronic, not alive at all.

From farther back, on the opposite side of the Loft, I watched as my girlfriend sashayed toward the rest of his, her round hips jutting left, then right as she came upon bare feet.  She gripped the carpet like a tiger, like a prowling female feline about ready to pounce.  “Aren’t they delicious to watch?” asked Ramona when she came abreast of Tirza, who had still not moved.

“W-what?” sputtered my ex-girlfriend.

“Doesn’t it get you all
mojada
just watching them?” clarified Ramona, using the feminine word for “wet” in Spanish.  When spoken in a sexual context, it meant “soaked”.

Now Tirza was really confused and came to rest upon the bottoms of her feet fully.  Her gaze shifted to my girlfriend.  “What!?!” she intoned, her brow knitted.

The three of us giggled like elementary kids after hearing someone say a really bad word for the first time.  Tirza was more Valley Girl than Latina almost from the day she was born, even though both of her parents spoke fluent Spanish.

Her head whipped about between the three of us, anger growing behind her eyes, thinking we’d played some sort of cruel joke at her expense.

“It means ‘wet’… only in a girlie sort of way,” supplied Ramona, raising her eyebrows as she tried to get the point across to my ex-girlfriend.

Katie and I unglued ourselves from one another, though we continued to h
old hands.  We all watched the comprehension dawn upon the tiny teen before us.

“Eeew, Ramona, why would
you think that would turn me on?!?” bellowed Tirza, affronted at the very thought of becoming aroused from watching Katie and I going at one another.

“…Because it does exactly that to me…,” was all she said, and then gave me and my cousin one of her magnificent smiles.

Tirza’s jaw dropped like an anvil.  “You can’t be serious,” she managed after a time.

Her eyes danced toward those of my ex-girlfriend, until she was looking at her out of the furthest corners.  “I
am
serious, Tirza.”

This boggled Tirza’s mind.  It was plain for all of us watching.  Her tiny body shook with what had to be incomprehensible thoughts.  “How… How could that be true, Ramona?  That’s his cousin and you’re his girlfriend, how could you share him with
her
?  They are blood relatives.”  I had never heard such skepticism from Tirza before.  Not even when we’d argued over religion or Theology in the past.  Those were two of the most important topics of consideration in her life.  Still, she hadn’t shown as much disdain or loathing of my difference of opinion when it came to the importance of Jesus in one’s life than she displayed right then.

Katie went
livid, her cast darkening.  Tirza had made her angry.

I immediately squeezed her hand and she glanced up at me.  I shook my head in a minuscule fashion.  It was imperceptive to all but Katie. 
Not now, my love.  Not now.

“I can’t change what is, Tirza.  I think one day you will understand it all just as readily as I do, and as they do.”  She motioned toward me and my cousin.  “It
’s something I can’t quite explain, and yet, I know it is a truth I cannot deny.  I couldn’t change this even If I wanted to.  It is hardwired into us, a kind of mental tug that draws us all to him.  It is getting stronger with every passing day.

“Isn’t that right, Katie?” asked Ramona, her voice full with meaning, yet there was a measured quality to it.  A church confessional came to mind, though I don’t know why.

It was my cousin’s turn to squeeze my hand.  “Yes,” she murmured, looking into my eyes.  I was amazed at love behind hers - pure, simple, and unblemished.  I imagined at the time, it was like that of a child’s love for its parent – devoid of conditions.  Only Katie had taken her love one step further.  She wanted to be my wife.

My gaze was drowning in the hazel pools of my cousin’s orbs when Tirza stomped suddenly, exploding with an exasperated huff, stalked over to the bed and sat down heavily.  She crossed her arms across herself and stared up at Katie and me.  “Do you know how much it hurt me when you spoke her name
, while we were making love?”

I turned to face the sitting girl, feeling shame and
chagrin creeping up and over my shoulders with a sickly touch.  It made me cringe.  “It was mistake, Tirza, an errant slip of the tongue.  You were never supposed to know.  No one was, not even Katie.”

Tirza’s face bunched.  “No one was to know, you secretly wanted your cousin?  You wanted to keep it secret, you were thinking of her, while you were screwing me that day?  Doing the same things to her that you were doing to me?  These were big things, Estefan.  What I was doing with you when we were together, I hadn’t done with anyone else, but you.  I trusted you, because I believed in what we had, because you told me that you loved me.”

“I did love you, Tirza,” I said at once, the memory of that emotion flooded into me like water gushing through a failing dam.  It was small at first, but grew exponentially until it was all I could feel.  I was drowning in the memory of her.

Tirza cradled her head in her hands, shaking her head
back and forth for a few seconds.  Then, with abrupt ferocity, she sputtered, “How could you love me when you were love with your cousin at the same time?!?”

“I did… I was!” I replied just as
assured as her.

She looked away from me, crossing her arms about her person once more, pursing her lips,
sucking at them in obvious acrimony and misdoubt.  “Oh my god, such a typical answer to hear, at a time like this, especially from a guy.”

“He’s not lying, Tirza.”

All three of us turned to peer at Ramona who had maneuvered herself, so she was now standing directly before the tiny teenage girl on the bed.

“How do you know that?” Tirza snapped.  She wanted to pick a fight.  It was evident by her tone.

“Because, he is not,” was her succinct retort.

My ex-girlfriend glared at my girlfriend through eyes that squinted with d
istrust and frustration, and some degree of antagonism as well.

Ramona suddenly bent at the knees and squatted before Tirza.  They were more or less at eye level with one another.  “He is not lying,” she began, placing one of her hands upon the other’s knee.  “He is different, Tirza.”  She chanced a glance in my direction.  “Very different,” she went on, “and you have to understand this difference, if you are ever going to understand him.  He might say or act similar to other men his age, but, on his most basic level, he is made differently.  He will always be apart from them.  That is what you have to remember or he will drive you crazy.

“He would be dangerous to women if he used his will against us.  He could cause more traumas to our sex than any other man in the history of Mankind, but that’s only if he put his mind and his body to the full extent of his ability.  He could have us all in his palm and crush our hearts by pitting us against one another or by making it a game to win his heart.  He could set himself as the prize among all prizes if he chose, but he doesn’t.  Thankfully, he doesn’t.  He’s not built that way.  He chooses to love instead and because he has a massive heart.  I think it allows him to love more than one woman.”  She stood and sauntered up to me.  “So far, Tirza, I can see five women -
five women
- he will love and five women who will love him back, and that might not be all of them.  There may be more…”