Front Porch Thing

But Emma certainly didn't look like she needed help. She looked like she was shaking with pleasure, quivering in the plant's embrace. Her breath was coming in panting gasps, and Kate thought she heard tiny subvocal moans coming from the suffocating mat of vegetation. Kate didn't know what her friend sounded like during sex, for all sorts of really obvious reasons, but she was getting a surprisingly good idea right now and it was wigging her shit out, big time. She stumbled backward down the steps, her head swimming with vertigo but her eyes absolutely refusing to move even a millimeter away from the thing on the front porch lest it somehow sprout limbs and lunge for her.

Emma let out a final squirm, a last groan of uninhibited ecstasy, and pulled herself free of the plant. For a split second, Kate thought she saw vines clinging to Emma's skin, lacing her with a delicate tracery of mottled green before retracting into the mass of the pod. She turned to Kate as if nothing had happened. "I'm sorry, hon," she said, smiling as though she was seeing Kate for the first time in months. "I got a little bit distracted. What were we talking about?"

Kate's throat tightened shut for a long moment. Her legs continued to propel her backwards across the lawn. Finally, she managed to squeak out, "Um, I have to...um, Mom and Dad need me for something." Then she turned and fled. She waited by the car until her parents had finished their shopping, and met their inquiries about Emma with a series of noncommittal murmurs. When she got back to the house, she went around to the back door.

The rest of the day passed in a haze of terror for Kate; she twitched every time the front door opened or closed, and she kept glancing out of the corner of her eye at her parents as if they were going to grab her at any second and force her to hump the monstrous plant-beast. It had them all under some sort of spell, clearly, something that drugged them up and made them forget that they weren't always slaves to a freakish mind-controlling pod. And it had everyone, every single person in town in its thrall. Kate didn't know how long she had, but she felt certain that the quickest way to get assimilated or brainwashed or whatever was to let on that she knew.

So she told her mother that Emma was fine, but that she was feeling weirdly jet-lagged and needed to go to bed early. She only ate the meat out of her dad's burger, justifying it with a babbling monologue about a new diet that she was certain was going to embarrass her hideously when she looked back on it, and she went up to her room. And then she came up with a plan...okay, first she had a good cry and a nice long panic attack and freaked out for a little while about being in an actual real honest-to-God horror movie, right down to the shitty cell phone reception in Wyoming. But then she came up with a plan.

Her parents still seemed to need sleep. If Kate took a nap now and set her alarm for, say, three in the morning, she could get up and slip downstairs while they were in bed. She could grab the keys from where her dad always left them on the hook by the front door, and drive to Kaycee or Jasper or even Cheyenne, as far as she needed to go until she stopped seeing pods on the front porch of every house. And then she could call the police or the army or the CDC or someone and tell them that everyone in Hickory Springs was acting strange, and she thought they might be sick or something. She didn't let herself think of what might happen beyond that.

She barricaded the door with her computer chair, and lay down on the bed. She thought at first she might have difficulty getting any rest, but the wild swings of panic and fear had left her so wrung out that she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Her last waking thought was a prayer; she hadn't prayed in years, but if there was ever a time when she needed God to hear her it was now.

*****

And of course she dreamed of the front porch thing again. She dreamed of tiny little spores of pollen, so small as to be almost invisible, wafting off of its skin and drifting on the breeze. In her dream, she knew that was what Emma had been inhaling, the dust getting into her lungs and releasing chemicals into her bloodstream that fogged up her friend's brain and made everything about the whole situation seem perfectly normal. And now it was just below Kate's room doing the same thing. If Kate breathed in any of it, she'd be helplessly enslaved.

Within minutes, the pollen was seeping up through the floorboards in a rising mist. There was so much that she could see it now, a thick yellowish haze that was everywhere, and she stood on the bed to keep it from touching her. This was what happened to all the others, she knew it. They all fell asleep and the plant released its spores and took over everyone's mind, everyone except Kate. She needed to get out. She went to the window, but it was stuck shut, and she remembered that was because she was so afraid of the tentacles that she superglued it shut before she went to bed. She looked around for something to break it with.

She found an old 4H trophy from high school, and she had just enough time to appreciate the irony because she got it for raising giant mind-control pods before she hit the window with it as hard as she could. She heard the smash of broken glass, but somehow when the window shattered a swirl of pollen swarmed into the room like a horde of angry bees and went directly for her face. Kate held her breath as long as she could, thrashing and struggling to try to get her head clear of the spores, but eventually she ran out of oxygen and had to gasp for air and the dust got inside her.

It didn't feel bad, though. It felt wonderful, warm and mellow on her tongue like buckwheat honey. She found herself sucking in great, deep lungfuls of pollen, a mindless smile spreading across her face like the inexorable march of ivy along a brick wall. She needed this. She didn't know how she'd lived her whole life without the pollen inside her, puppeteering her body and making her squirm out of her clothing with indecent haste.

It was part of the control process, she realized. The more she masturbated, the more turned on she became. The more turned on she became, the quicker she breathed and the faster her blood flowed through her veins. With every beat of her heart, she was spreading the powerful drug that bound her deeper and deeper into the pollen's control. And it felt so impossibly good that it only made her touch herself faster and faster and faster as her body responded helplessly to the plant's desires.

She tried to stop, even just to slow down, but her fingers rubbed her clit with furious intensity as the thing's power over her deepened. She felt it in her head, a throbbing, pounding pulse that drowned out all her thoughts and left her straining her hips upward to meet her own touch. It was the beat of her heart, she realized, as the dream began to break up into fragments and the fragments began to melt into mist and the mist began to clear. The throb that was so strong was her heartbeat and she could feel it on her clit and she really was masturbating, she woke right into the pleasure and it was so intense that she had to grab for a pillow to muffle her screams as she came.

She didn't want to enjoy it so much. Even as her climax washed over her, tightening her nipples into stiff buds and flushing her cheeks and making her pussy gush all over her fingers with near-incoherent levels of ecstasy, she was already remembering all the stupid details of the dream that fell apart the second she thought about them with her waking mind. Supergluing the windows? A 4H trophy for growing giant seed pods? Pollen that flew around the room like cartoon bees? But apparently all that shit got her motor running like nobody's business. Kate hoped she never had to look up anything to do with the pod online. Rule 34 was going to utterly break her fucking brain.

She wiped her hand on her sheets--yeah, her mom was officially going to kill her, but Kate was at a point where she'd gladly take the world's most awkward conversation about masturbation if it meant that her parents weren't in the thrall of an alien monster--and checked her phone. The display read 1:30. Close enough. She pulled up her pants, slid her computer chair out of the way, and put her ear to the door for a moment. She didn't hear anything. She held her breath, just to be sure, but the hallway was perfectly silent. She opened the door.

There was a naked woman on the other side of the threshold.

No. There was a naked Kate on the other side of the threshold.

It was unquestionably her--the same long black hair, the same dark brown eyes, the same long, slender legs. Kate could even pick out little details like the scar on her chin from a childhood bicycle accident and the slightly oblong shape of her left nipple that always bugged her when she looked in the mirror, even though she knew nobody in the world cared but her. It was Kate, in every detail. And she was smiling. She was smiling like she had the biggest, most exciting secret in the world and she couldn't wait to share it with Kate. Even with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Kate still found a way to be terrified by that smile.

"The calibration is complete," the double said. Kate involuntarily winced--she hated the way her voice sounded. "We apologize for the inconvenience, but we needed to probe your mind in order to understand how to properly interact with you. The communion was best handled during REM state, when your cerebrospinal fluid was at peak flow. It may have resulted in some dreams that were...disorienting."

Kate reached down with her left hand and gave her right arm a hearty pinch, just to make sure this wasn't another dream. "So you're saying you were trying to read my mind and it accidentally gave me alien sex fantasies?"

Other-Kate's head tilted to one side slightly. Her smile faded just a little and she looked lost in thought--no, not exactly lost. Just paused, like her brain was transferring a file over dial-up and she was waiting to open it. "Ah," she said at last, the smile brightening as she spoke again. "We understand you, but you're not correct. It would be more accurate to say that we were trying to learn about your sex fantasies, and as a side effect you experienced them. We wanted to know what aroused you. Now that we know, we can commune far more effectively."

With that, the duplicate's body split open in the middle, unsealing down an invisible line that ran vertically down its chest and around to the inside of its legs. The gap widened, peeling back to reveal a small forest of tiny wiggling vines that took up almost the entire interior of the hollow form. Kate had just enough time to inhale for a scream before they sprang for her.

There was a moment of sickening, disorienting terror as they wrapped around her, binding her so tightly that they practically mummified her body. Kate tried to scream, but her mouth was encircled by so many strands of plant matter that it barely even came out as a murmur. Then they began to retract, dragging Kate right along with it. She wriggled and thrashed, but she was about as strong as a newborn kitten compared to the tendrils that held her.

It somehow disturbed Kate even more when the hollow arms undressed her instead of the tentacles. The vines simply slithered out of the way, allowing her double's strange, empty limbs to rip Kate's clothes clean off until she was completely naked. Then they turned her, rotating her body until she was facing away from her doppelganger, and forced her into the exact same position as the other Kate. She felt herself dragged across the floor until her body was pressed into the opening the vines left behind.

The opening sealed up around Kate, leaving her trapped in darkness that fit her like a second skin. The eyes of her double were opaque, the mouth fit perfectly around her lips, the hands and fingers could be touching anything for all Kate could feel. She was lost in perfect sensory deprivation for a moment...but then the pleasure began. The vines caressed her body, soothing away the fear and leaving only a delicious lassitude that promised an end to all the terror, all the panic, everything that stood between her and drowsy bliss. She couldn't hear the voice of the plant, but she could feel the way that it stimulated her into dreamy, dazed delight that numbed her mind so that she could listen to her body far more effectively.

She could hear a faint, indescribable sensation in the back of her head, like someone was describing the world around her to her and she was responding on some level with an idea of what she might do given that description...but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore but the pleasure. Her body couldn't see anything, couldn't hear anything, couldn't taste or smell and the only feeling she had was the delicious erotic sensation of a thousand tiny tickles against her skin. The shell that surrounded her knew just how to touch her, just how to caress her inside and out to send her drifting into a helpless dream of pure euphoric delight.

She felt her consciousness slipping away, melting into sensual fantasies that came from deep within her own mind. She struggled to stay awake, telling herself that the plant was lulling her into an endless stupor of pure and mindless pleasure, reminding herself that it was using all her desires against her. But the arousal was so strong, and the glamour of the waking dream of bliss tugged at her like a boat on a current until all she could think of was her sex.

She twitched once, her body trying to force her back to consciousness, but there was nothing to see behind the mask of her own face and nothing to do but give into her masturbatory daydreams. She was a passenger in her own body now, and something about being a passenger always made Kate drowsy. She felt herself go limp in the embrace of the plant shell, and wondered if she would be returning to New York with a front porch thing of her very own...and then her mind fell further into pleasure and she thought of nothing at all.

THE END