Pussy-Licker: Coming of the Darkula

'Wait' says Roxton. He retreats, careful not to make a sudden movement that could be misinterpreted. The camper van door gapes open and he clambers inside to face Grace. 'They're living out some weird Mad Max fantasy. I can't ask you to do this.'

'Seems to me we have no choice.' She meets his eyes unflinchingly. 'Let's do this.' She pulls her jacket off as they watch, pulls her boots off and shimmies out of her slacks. She straightens up nude. 'C'mon, guys, make it look good. Make me look like she does.'

Roxton slips his belt in a loose noose around her neck, she holds her hair aside to facilitate it. With a shaking hand Randall rummages around and produces a felt-tip pen, to write 'SLUT' across her breasts. He stands back to admire his handiwork.

They file out of the van, leaving the weapons inside, standing together. Roxton a pace ahead, leading Grace by the leash. The sun is low in the sky. There's no sound.

In the space between, they've unrolled a length of carpet across the asphalt. Four of them waiting, with the naked blonde girl. Her head still bowed. Harriman indicates to her, and she slumps down onto her knees, falling forward so that she's crouched passively on all fours.

Roxton glances nervously as Grace. Her jaw is set. Her eyes betray no waver of indecision. When she reaches the carpet edge, her bare toes encountering its softness, without inducement she lowers down onto all fours, side by side with the blonde girl. The two glancing at each other curiously. The men stand around in an awkward silence. Harriman coughs.

It's Randall who makes the first move. Unbuckles his pants, moving forward as they fall away, crouching down towards the blonde's head, she comes up to meet him, her mouth gaping. She takes his cock without hesitation. Then all hell breaks loose. Harriman laughs, moves in behind Grace, and slides a fat cock up between her parted legs, her hips raised to receive him. Another moves in at her face, and she sucks him simultaneously. Their bodies moving together, her free-hanging breasts shivering with each thrust.

The other men circle closer, taking their orifices of choice. When Randall pulls out of her mouth and moves around to her rear, Rico takes his place in the girl's mouth. The moist sounds of sex seem amplified, flesh slithering on flesh, gurgles and choking noises, grunts and moans.

The men work in teams, two simultaneously, switching mouth to cunt then cunt to mouth. The anonymous bodies blur, one after the other. Grace hears a choking gasp, glances across at the blonde girl. Their eyes meet. The other grimaces in a weird pained pleasure. Looking back over her shoulder she sees Roxton, and knows exactly what he's doing to her, and why her expression is so conflicted. Then her mouth is required by the next man. Until at last there are no more. Both girls stay crouched, unsure, awaiting instructions.

Harriman approaches Roxton, hand outstretched. 'Great way to bond, eh?' Roxton shakes the proffered hand warily. He indicates irritably at the girls, and they struggle uncertainly to their feet, brushing dirt from their knees.

'We get to cross the bridge now?'

'Sure, we're all friends here, ain't we?' But Harriman strides towards the camper van, climbs up into the driver's seat, and fires the engine. Roxton reaches out to help Grace, and they pace across to climb into the back. She retrieves her white leatherette jacket and pulls it around her shoulders, using a wet-wipe to clean her face, then down between her legs.

Harriman steers the vehicle carefully forward, through the gate in the barricade. The ragged trail of men file in behind them, the blonde girl too. Grace watches keenly. There are more armed men inside the protective barrier. Too many of them. The ramp of the bridge rises beyond, leading to the river's far shore. She sees it all, frozen in strange clarity. Her mind still buzzing, surging with the multiple-fuck sensations, as though her senses are heightened. The light is unnatural. Casting tall mauve shadows. As though she's hallucinating unreal aftershocks.

No. There are two suns in the sky. The second, mauve sun, descending through cloud layers, in between the tower-blocks. So bright it's dazzling, too painful to look at directly. She shields her eyes. There's panic outside, some are scattering, others assume defensive positions, blasting sporadic bursts of fire at the incoming globe. It's gliding in low. Its light prickling exposed areas of skin with radiation-burn.

Harriman slams on the brakes, judders the van to a halt. As he starts to his feet to dismount, Grace smashes him in the face with a tyre lever. He staggers back, she hits him again so he crumples down into the well. She scrambles over the bucket seat, releases the door catch so it swings open, and kicks him hard. He falls back against the doorframe, loses purchase, and head-over-heels out towards the tarmac. She guns the engine.

The alien sun as spinning like a blazing comet, passing low now. Roxton is at the door as the van accelerates. 'Rico, Randall... here!' She steers in a wide arc. L'Estrada leaps aboard. Rico too. Randall pulls the blonde girl by the leash, hauls her into the van.

'You wanna get out of this? You want to come with us?' yells Roxton.

'What would I want to do that for?' spits the naked woman.

'The way they treat you. You're better with us.'

'Lemme go. I don't need this. They look after me, protect me.'

'You're choice' says Grace over her shoulder, as she decelerates long enough for the girl to jump clear, then hits higher gear and spins the wheel towards the ramp, yawing and canting. There's an explosion ripping the facia off an overhanging building complex, igniting in eruptions of flame sparked by the spinning sun-sphere. She hits the ramp towards the bridge, thrumming across the span, the shadows of support-beams spoking across them. The startle of gunfire fades in their wake. There's no pursuit. The sun already re-climbing the sky.

'Right' says Rico, consulting his sat, 'take us right.' Off the far-side ramp and onto a new endlessly deserted highway. She throttles back to cruising speed, avoiding the rusting corpses of wrecked autos.

'You did fine, Grace' concedes Roxton evenly.

'What the hell was that flying fire-cracker anyway?' says Rico.

'Sentient, robotic, programmed AI... who knows? When the Darkula open their portals, other stuff gets through too, bugs, microbes, seeds. Could be their equivalent of rodent infestation. Just be glad it arrived when it did.'

'If it was coincidence' points out Randall. 'It's almost like it meant to be there, helping us.' He shrugs, suddenly flustered when they turn to him. 'Hey, don't bug me, I'm just saying...'

Eventually they pull off the main strip into a mall to stay overnight. The sky rippled by tides of strange light. Rico and L'Estrada investigate the upper mall levels, gunning down a group of rad-muties sheltering in a storefront, disturbing the stench of putrefying flesh.

There's a supermarket below. Forcing through concertina door-shutters into the rear stockroom, most of it is ransacked, but there are crates of untouched cans and even bottles. In an enclosed central court they ignite a huge roaring fire, sparks dancing into the vault above, and break out the food, heating it up on a makeshift grill overhanging the blaze. The bottles of surprisingly good lager help. The three - Rico, Randall and L'Estrada stand around her now with a new easy familiarity, and she sucks each of them in turn. Then they fuck.

Eventually she stands, naked, brushes herself down, teases her hair back, and seeks out Roxton. He's sitting in an alcove dismantling and reassembling his machine-pistol. He looks up as she approaches. 'This time' she smiles, 'it's on my terms. This time, you get to know just how good a woman feels.' She crouches down to unfasten his pants.

Earthfort, the following day. Concrete bunker above surrounded by gun-tower emplacements. A ramp opens to admit them. Swallowing them underground. Armoured figures circle them, fumigate them, x-ray them, cat-scan them. Doctors take swabs, blood-samples, oral and rectal probes. They're documented, interrogated. Then dropped down further subterranean levels where vast machinery powers strikeback arsenals of mighty doomsday weaponry, to quarantine cells, in naked antiseptic isolation.

Roxton nods as they're separated. 'It's fine. They've got to be certain. Once through this we're in, part of the retaliation. It's only a matter of time. Wait.'

Grace slumps in the cell corner. Crouches down, head in hands. Lightning bursts in vivid storms across her retinas. Flashbacks of the bug clattering up the stairwell. She sees it all, frozen in strange clarity. Rael and Miko loosing off tracer bursts spattering its chitinous shell. Nerve-shredding terror, in the formic acid urine-stench. While Oliver, from below, works around its thorax, lodging grenades, so it erupts in a larval deluge of sloppy flame and streaming gut, threshing jointed legs, mandibles screaming so high-pitched it splits eardrums numb.

Oliver drenched in its fire-stream, scarred and melting, dragged to safety into the suite. She sits beside him, as he turns comatose, then shrieking. When his face caves in it's squirming with corpse-white maggot-larvae. Rael and Miko toss him from the balcony, he howls all the way down with what's left of his mouth, to splatter-impact. It's only in the silence that descends afterwards that she feels silver scintillas of ice-pain, and hears the maggot chomping its way through her brain-tissue. Blackness. Forgetfulness. Sleep. Nightmare. Terror.

She slumps. Crouches. Her mind buzzing, surging, as though through heightened senses. The light is unnatural. Casting tall mauve shadows. As though she's hallucinating unreal aftershocks. No. There are now two suns. For she's becoming one of them. Her skin is glowing, beams of intense lights pricking out through flesh-punctures in energy-spikes. Her outline shivering, melting, slurring into a single radiant mass. A spinning sphere of light. No thought. No consciousness. Racing towards her programmed detonation...

Commander Harriman curses, spits down from the heights of the barricade. Shields his eyes against the sudden glare. A nuke? A retaliatory strike at the Darkula? No. The massive eruption beyond the skyline is inland, from the direction of the supposed Earthfort. The last human stronghold. No more. He surveys the compound below him. The scattered men and women safe, for the moment, behind his own fortifications. This, he thinks, is now the final human redoubt. He, its last commander. He watches the sky.

BY TRISTAN TROTSKY