Black Cherry executed her leap from the overpass with cliff-diver perfection. Centered and combat-ready, Yves had observed her descent with a calm, analytical appreciation for fine form. Her wings fanned out when she first sailed into the air. When her jump achieved its apex, she curled downward, thrust fists forward, and snapped wings inward. The crimson wings slapped together at supersonic speed. Black Cherry rode the thunderclap, power-diving at the Jeep. She hammered into hood, a pile-driving pillar, a fallen angel sculpted from red clay and blackest basalt. The hood and engine block crumpled as the Jeep rebounded into the air, pivoting on the immobile fulcrum Black Cherry had become. Yves saw her sneer, her page boy hair cut flying wild, her abyssal gaze locked on Dee's face.
"…Master!" Her voice was triumphant, primal. Demoniac.
Dee turned away from her, his expression stony and stolid even as the Jeep's rear wheels rose higher than the front. He reached behind and above his head, bracing himself against the Jeep's roll-bar. The trunk of the Jeep soared higher. With Black Cherry stapling the hood to the road, the vehicle's chassis squealed as it fought against the opposing forces trying to tear it in half.
Dee kicked his left foot into the driver's side foot well. Yves could not think as fast as a meliae but years of martial meditation kept him focused amidst madness. Even so, Yves' detachment threatened to collapse into giddy panic once he intuited Dee's intentions. He's not bracing his body against the Jeep's roll-cage. Dee's bracing the roll-cage against his body. The Jeep pivoted vertical. Yves' seat belt bit into his tender shoulder.
The cords in Dee's neck flexed. His muscled arms strained as he battled torque, stress, and metal fatigue. Holy shit. The passenger compartment buckled but resisted caving inward and crushing Yves to death. It's really true. Some part of Yves must have been expecting to die at that instant, because he found himself very surprised to be alive.
Dee's a fucking superhero.
Black Cherry was forced backward as the Jeep hurtled upright. The vehicle's shadow overtook her. Her triumphal sneer faltered. Two tons of American truck know-how bore down upon her. Yves heard Raspberry's battle cry over the ruckus of tortured metal, plastic, and glass. "Say 'Splat,' bitch!"
Black Cherry set her jaw and swung her legs down, puncturing the pavement with her Mary Jane clogs. Her wings shot forward, around, and then behind the Jeep. Crimson claws pierced the undercarriage. Yves heard Ursula yelp and stamp. Black Cherry's sneer returned with a lazy roll of her head. Tension gathered within her gel.
Dee spoke. To Yves, Dee's words came from outside time and transcended other sound, as if the world paused, eager to listen. His voice bypassed Yves' ears still half-stoppered with beeswax. It resounded through bone, sang in the blood, rang clear as a tower bell in the brain. "Raz, to Yves. Now."
Two lavender arms shot in through the open driver's window in uncoiling springs. Cool fingers entwined behind Yves' neck. The bendy-straw arms cinched up slack and Raspberry's angelic face zoomed into view until her jellied button nose dimpled his cheek. Her eyes searched his as she muttered a lightning quick, "Awfuckit," and kissed him hard and square on the lips. His mouth filled with the flavors of summer as more and more of Raspberry's jellied substance poured through the window and pressed its subtle, supple weight against him.
Yves had never been kissed in bullet time before. His heightened awareness let the kiss linger even though it lasted no more than a second or two. He could not fully process the experience, as his inner ear reported he was now suspended upside down.
The Jeep slung high over Black Cherry's head. She crowed in triumph as her arms and wings took on the full weight of the Jeep and all its occupants. I'll have to try this again, Yves vowed to himself as Raspberry broke the awkward kiss. If only the person kissing me back had a dick, I'm sure I could get it right. Outside, Black Cherry followed through, accelerating her pitch. If only I could survive the next few sec—
Black Cherry hurled the Jeep with all her strength. The vehicle flipped end-over-end once, then twice, before colliding with a ferroconcrete pylon. The blacktop below fissured. Cement chips and dust showered from the highway above. The Jeep folded up, chevron-shaped, and tumbled to the ground.
"…Splat," said she.
Update 01/15/07
The Jeep hit the pavement passenger-side down. The safety glass windshield fractured milky white on impact. Cracks and torn seams in the canvas top bubbled and wept golden Champaign froth. The carriage bled oil, radiator and hydraulic fluid. Dust settled in the quiet.
The driver's side door bulged outward then burst away in geyser of lavender unguent. The crest of the eruption resolved into the upper body of Raspberry herself, a bust carved from the richest amethyst. More gel peeled away to reveal Yves, slack, motionless, and cradled in Raspberry's willowy embrace. Yves groaned.
Raspberry startled at the sound. Yves rolled his head and winced. Raspberry's shoulders sagged and she hugged Yves close. "Shh. I gotcha, babe." Her limpid gaze fell upon Black Cherry. Raspberry purpled with rage. She hissed through gritted teeth. "I am gunna rip off your head and shit down your neck you jam-ragged, clit-clot cunt."
The dainty batwings poking out from behind Black Cherry's ears flared. "I'll kill you where you stand…" The scarlet girl froze in mid-snarl, blinking her confusion. "As soon as I figure out what you just said."
The Jeep's windshield exploded. Nuggets of safety glass flew like birdshot, ricocheted off Black Cherry's creamy red, rubbery hide, and clattered against the yellow SUV in the shadows behind her. Dee withdrew his fists. "Raz," he said, "enough banter. Get Yves out of here."
Raspberry's bare hips and legs coalesced and she pivoted to jump from the Jeep. Black Cherry sidled and stretched a wing wide to block her path. "That's my playmate," she said, petulant and spoiled and pointing at Yves with a wing claw. "Master gave him to me and I only got to play with him once."
Dee elbowed out of the Jeep and rose to his feet, uncut and unbruised. "Let her go, Cherry."
Black Cherry golf-clapped her hands. "Oh, Master: name me." She giggled and grabbed her knees, the glee dawning on her face in complete contrast with her words. "Name me like you named your stupid green whore. Name me and I will become she who eats worlds for you."
Something heavy clonked and settled in the back of the Jeep. Black Cherry craned her neck to see but Dee hustled in between, his back to the vehicle. "Let them all go, Cherry, and I will stay." He swung one arm behind his back, hand opening in closing in a pantomime yap yap yap.
Black Cherry clucked and dismissed the notion with a pshaw flick of the wrist. "You don't mean that, Master. You're going to stay anyway. Besides, I don't think Raspberry wants to leave. I had her made for you, you know." Dee pointed to the left with the hand hidden behind his back. "Why haven't you fucked her yet? I would smell her on you if you had. She wants you to fuck her, Master." She tipped her head, leading with her nose, breathing deep and nibbling her bottom lip. "She wants you so badly I can taste it from here." Dee pointed left again, looped his index finger around to the right before bringing his hand down flat. "But she can't handle it like I can, Master. She's so horny she can't understand you want her to feint to the left so you can flank me on the right while I'm monologing."
"Oh," drawled Raspberry behind him. "Now I get it."
Update 01/16/07
Dee heard a fizzy susurrus. Sunny slush frothed down the Jeep's sideways roof and heaped onto the pavement. Raspberry's speedy recovery matched her quick temper, but Dee knew CeeCee and Eurydice needed much more time to sort themselves out after such a rough jolt. He opted to stall, hoping to Hell that Ursula and Nyx were unhurt. "X-ray vision?"
Her head-wings rolled into cute megaphones around her ears. "Sonar." She winked. "Echolocation off the metal behind you, of course, because you're so impenetrable, Master." Her head-wings unfurled only a fraction before Dee spoke in his newfound voice.
"Let them go, Cherry."
Black Cherry gaped. Head-wings twitched and wilted with melt. Sanguinary brandy brimmed her lips and slicked her sex as the pylons supporting the overhead arch of the highway amplified and took up her name. Cherry—Cherry—Cherry. She rocked with each echo, dropping to one knee, then the other, and then to all fours. The last echo played itself out, a long, low, bubbling roar, leonine and almost subsonic: Cherrrry. Black Cherry keened in reply, arms trembling, wings pearling with fat drops of ruby nectar. "Yes, Master, yes. Go." The underpass still purred with the final vestiges of Dee's echoed voice—rrr…rrry—and Black Cherry fell back on her haunches. Head bowed, she waved Raspberry away. "Go. Go!"
Raspberry dismounted from the Jeep, her elastic legs protracting down onto the road before returning to their usual sumptuous, classical perfection. Yves, face pinched in pain, rode the gentle descent in her arms. Raspberry eased by Black Cherry, twittering and pawing at the ground. "Go, go," the scarlet girl whimpered. Dee's echo died. Black Cherry's hands curled into fists. "No."
Dee charged, seized a bleeding wing. He planted his feet and started a vicious twist. Black Cherry reared back and tore the captured wing off her shoulder with her own hands. The wing dissolved in a russet flood. The momentum of his planned attack knocked Dee off his feet. "Run, Raz!"
Black Cherry howled, "I told you I could handle it, Master!" She bitch-slapped the fleeing Raspberry across the back with the flat of her remaining wing.
Raspberry exploded into purple haze. Yves sailed, ragged-doll limbed, through the air. The was a strange sound, consonant with the recording of smashing glass played backward and too fast, or a thousand harp strings rubbed with steel nails. Raspberry snapped into solidity parallel and inches below Yves. She threw her arms and legs around him a split second before they both hit the pavement.
Dee kipped up but Black Cherry clipped him on the chin with an uppercut on her backswing and knocked him flat on his back. "I should have known my minions would never be enough for you. Not like I am." Behind her, Raspberry and Yves streaked over the blacktop, trailing a lavender slime wake. "I'm glad I stopped with the latex gimp. Where is she, anyway? Hiding isn't her style at all. Ah, well, she'll show up just in the nick of time, I suppose."
Dee sat up, rattling his head, his jaw pins-and-needles numb.
Black Cherry sighed. "Where was I? Oh, monologing, yes." She splayed her hands, crimson fluid rushing up her legs and humping her back with a burgeoning wing. Her once-nectarous surface smoothed into a polished rind of creamy carmine. "So there I was, with boxes and boxes of Jell-O, just oodles of raw collagen powder." Dee staggered to his feet. "I had to do something with it, but I'm not really the baking type." Dee charged, arms out, palms flat. He struck her in the abdomen, arms working in a peculiar rhythm. Nothing happened.
Black Cherry cleared her throat. Dee stared down at his hands, one on her tummy, the other sandwiched between her breasts. The geek and the scarlet girl looked each other in the eye.
"So I ate it all," Black Cherry smirked, and punched Dee in the gut with the force of a wrecking ball.
Update 01/18/07
The asphalt dimpled into two shallow potholes beneath Black Cherry's feet when her underhand swing caught Dee's stomach right below the ribs. The pin-and-needles sensation erupted across his body, not just over his skin but through meat and fiber. A seismograph slung down from his butt would have recorded a 6.7 Richter scale Dee-quake with its epicenter beneath the intruding crimson fist. Dee stood motionless, eyes watering, for an absurdly long and breathless moment.
The laws of physics caught up with his nanomek-enhanced physique and launched Dee into the air, doubled over, a superman in sweatpants flying in reverse. His trajectory described a grand ellipse until he crashed, still ass-backwards, into a high corner where a recessed pylon met the overhead highway, right above the yellow SUV. The entire structure shivered, cement blocks scraping together louder than a firecracker. The steel rebar enforcing the integrity of the overpass fatigued but held.
Dee fell. He belly flopped hard onto the roof of the yellow SUV. The vehicle's rear and side windows blew out as the impact bent the roof at jaunty angle. Three figures, already crouched and hidden between the SUV and the pylon, dropped to their knees and escaped the spray of glass.
Numbness blossomed into dull headache and honest-to-goodness, throbbing pain. He rolled his head to the side. The three figures stood swaddled in shadow. Heads and arms hung low, faces covered in bedraggled, damp and filthy hair, reminding Dee of undead wet girls from Japanese horror movies. Dee thought he heard a muffled buzzing noise.
He managed to mumble, "Ow, quit it," before all the lights went out.
Raspberry and Yves slid to a slippery halt. Raspberry rolled over and laid Yves out on his back. She fought off weakness, tried to be tender. Raspberry, pale and wan, knelt over his inert body. The long trail of purple jelly collected into oozy polliwogs wiggling upstream toward her. She bent close to Yves and nestled her head against his chest, eyes squeezed shut in hope. She felt a strong heartbeat, a shuddery breath. Relief flooded through her and the polliwogs raced to feed her growing, rising, darkening, furious form.
Black Cherry contemplated her fist, mashed flatter than a ball of clay thrown against a brick wall, less than a dozen feet away from where Raspberry, radiant with rage, made her stand. The intense silence made the scarlet girl turn and look on with mild interest. Raspberry said, "Burn."
She spat acid. A sizzling jet of molten violet struck Black Cherry in the face. The scarlet girl screeched and reeled, clawing at her face with her good hand. Raspberry spat again but overshot as Black Cherry fell kicking to the ground. The ejecta struck a concrete pylon.
"Raz," Yves called to her over the Black Cherry's now burbling screams. "Raz."
Raspberry sat on her knees next to him again, and took his hand in hers. "Yeah?"
Yves watched the purple sputum eat a pizza-sized hole in the pylon's concrete, revealing ribs of blackened steel rebar. "What was that?" His voice was very faint.
"My acid tongue. CeeCee calls me a real spitfire. I think it's one of her stupid double tundra thingies." She glanced up. A wide shape, a massive curvy mound of peach-orange ice cream, drew itself together by the overturned Jeep. Raspberry smiled. "You can ask the fat ass yourself in a minute."
Yves shut his eyes. "I didn't know you could do that."
"There's a lot you don't know about me." She felt so tired.
Yves reopened his eyes and Raspberry did her best to smile again. "You wouldn't happen to be a goo guy in drag, would you?" Yves asked.
The burbling screams tapered off into wet hissing.
Raspberry shrugged. "Nah."
Yves sighed. "Ah, well." He paused. Raspberry guessed he was waiting for a comeback. She did not feel like giving one. Yves frowned. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Raspberry stood, mimed dusting off her knees. "Hawking a loogie takes a shitload of nanomek, that's all." She thrust her hands on her hips. "And I've already spent a couple o' fuckloads saving your pansy ass, twice. I…" She blinked, gazing off into the middle-distance. "I…" She looked down.
Twelve inches of, curved, crimson wing-claw protruded from between her breasts. It curled lazily downward, dripping purple ichor, its needle-sharp tip pricking her tummy, poised to rip.
"Oh," Raspberry said.
Update 01/19/07
Dee drifted in squishy darkness. Wait a minute, he thought, I'm not unconscious. His head bopped to a jerking rhythm. Someone's sitting on my face.
Update 01/21/07
Exhaustion, fear, and horror all demanded Yves cringe, look away, or succumb to shock. He refused. "Raz." He would not abandon Raspberry. "Raz, look at me." She met his gaze. "Breathe. Don't look away. Eight forces sustain creation," he told her, calm and sure, as the red claw tore through her. "Breathe." Purple nectar spurted and stung his face and neck but Yves held Raspberry captive with his unblinking, sky-blue scrutiny. "Movement and stillness. Breathe." Yves sat up as Raspberry slumped toward him. He bobbed his head birdlike to keep their eyes locked. "Extension and contraction." Yves doffed his overshirt. Raspberry sank to her knees. "Breathe. Unification and division."
Raspberry swooned, surface tension failing. Her features ran as slowly melting wax. Yves swooped his overshirt about her, gathered her into his lap, securing the shirt with a quick knot of the sleeves. Tie-dye splotches bloomed over the white shirt but Raspberry held together. "Solidity and fluidity," Yves smiled down at her.
Raspberry pressed a cooling, gluey palm against his cheek. Her leer was a vague sickle-shape in her syrupy face. "You are shit fucking hot. We're so lucky Dee chose you." Yves wanted to ask the obvious question but saved it for later.
Black Cherry loomed, wings held close, claws clicking above her head. Curlicues of crimson vapor wafted from her mouth and brow. "Let her go." She protested in the tones of a peeved toddler. "You're mine. She doesn't get to play with you unless I say so. She hurt me and I am going to kill her. You're my playmate."
"Is he now?" CeeCee's golden bulk boiled up behind Black Cherry. "Well, Raz is mine, and I say you need to take a few Midol and mellow out."
Black Cherry spun, wings whickering. CeeCee stood her ground. Crimson wing claws stabbed deep into the moiling gel-flesh below her breasts. Buttery pudding suppurated around the sunken claws, bleeding in little rills that scrawled over the veins in Black Cherry's webbed wings. Black Cherry smirked, hooked her wing claws deep within CeeCee's core, and tugged to rend the amber woman in two.
CeeCee neither split nor budged. Black Cherry's Mary Janes scuffed over the pavement as the tugging motion of her wings dragged her a few feet closer to the amber woman's viscid, endlessly flowing curves. The little rills of cheesecake pudding rolling over her red wings surged into rivulets. Black Cherry frowned, jerked one shoulder backward—and tripped a step forward. The golden rivulets wove themselves into a thickening net across Black Cherry's wings. Questing tendrils of caramel crept across her back. The scarlet girl growled, gnashed her teeth, hauled with her other shoulder—and lurched sideways into CeeCee's abounding flesh.
Soft, amber cleavage swallowed Black Cherry's neck. CeeCee chuckled, a rich, glutinous sound. She wrapped her arms around the bewildered scarlet girl, kneaded Black Cherry's devil-red little rump and mushed their mons together. Black Cherry whimpered and surrendered to the urge to grind. Her wings, back, and legs were quickly coated in yellow cake batter.
"Honey," CeeCee clucked. Black Cherry's trembling chin vanished in the cloying avalanche of golden gel-flesh. "I knew you were cumming." CeeCee's maw yawned wide. "So I baked you a cake," she finished, and started devouring Black Cherry in earnest.
Raspberry, bug-eyed and enraptured by the sloppy spectacle, squirmed in Yves' lap. "Jesus fuck. Look-it. Look-it! Would ya look-it?"
Yves shook his head, eye shut tight. "I ain't look-it-ting."
Update 01/22/07
Addled and clobbered, Dee spent a few beats refocusing his senses. He had not plunged into comatose darkness. Some girl wearing skintight black jeans had scrabbled onto the bent roof of the yellow SUV, leapt froglike astraddle his face, and sat on his forehead, knees squeezed against his ribs. She rode the bridge of his nose like a berserk bicyclist slogging out the last few miles of Le Tour de France. Her denim seat sopped and reeked of sweat and sex and a hint of oven-fresh chocolate chip cookies. After five days of flavorful fucking, this was the final straw. A Pavlovian link between culinary aromas and raunchy, rancid screwing became indelibly hard-coded into Dee's brain.
The mystery girl buried her face in his crotch and mouthed his cock through his sweatpants and underwear. Her breath basted the cotton-nylon blends cupping his shaft and balls in sweltering warmth. His dick stiffened in reflex and the mystery girl assaulted him with a fully clothed fellatio-cunnilingus combo attack. Another day, Dee thought, grabbing handfuls of the ass bouncing against his forehead, another ambush sixty-nine session. He pried her ass away from his face. The jeans were so tight her cheeks felt rock solid. Sunlight spilled across the sodden camel-toe trying to stomp his nose flat. I bet this never happens to Batman.
A fountain of flaxen hair blotted out the sun. The blonde E-Z sorority sister, eyes blank of all expression except hunger, forced the mystery girl's ass high and rammed her tongue down Dee's throat. Dee craned his neck to take stock of his situation. The blonde stood on the hood of the SUV. Her white tee-shirt gaped open to reveal the top swells of big, wobbling tits. Her wide, wine-dark areola and fat nipples still stuck to the translucent, wet material of her tee. Wow, Ursula was right on about those.
"…Honey," Dee heard CeeCee say, her voice deep and oddly amplified, "I knew you were cumming so I baked you a cake." He tipped his head. CeeCee had enveloped Black Cherry almost head-to-toe and was suckling on the scarlet girl as she would slurp down a thick chocolate cherry milkshake. My God, Dee thought. Red wings dissolved and siphoned off in swirls into CeeCee's gullet. I should have known. ["…What can I say, honey, we go together well…"] Great spirals of black and crimson burst from Black Cherry's slowly deliquescing body and funneled into CeeCee, her gel-flesh banded and stormy with a riot of color. Chocolate and cherries go great with cheesecake. CeeCee is going to kick Black Cherry's ass.
The mystery girl whined and strained against the blonde's arms, trying to smack her ass back down atop Dee's face. Dee propped his head up, the blonde still slopping her lips over his in an attempt to tickle his tonsils. His crotch had sprouted a bobbing carrot-top; the mystery girl turned out to be the redhead. Her fingers fumbled over Dee's sweats. She yanked the elastic waist but, like proverbial monkey with his clenched fist stuck in the cookie jar, she would not stop munching on Dee's cock through his clothes and stalemated herself. The brunette E-Z sister hopped and kicked her way up the hatchback, clawing onto the roof. It's about to get pretty crowded up here. He twisted side to side. We're a good eight feet off the ground, glass everywhere, nowhere to maneuver. CeeCee's bought me some time. How do I get them off me without hurting them?
The blonde sucked his face with bottomless abandon. He tried his newfound voice anyway: "Ge' mmf." A collective shudder passed through the two girls ravaging him. Their ardor and enthusiasm doubled. The left-out brunette wailed and bounded up between his legs. Dee's dispassion toward their efforts became difficult to maintain and his dick fully engorged. Yeah, that worked well. What to do? I can't hurt them, even by accident. They're innocent. ["…innocent of this matter, I mean…"]
The brunette pushed the redhead away. The redhead's mouth popped off Dee's cock with an angry huff. Her hands, as if driven by some other willpower, still tugged mechanically on his pants, and she finally managed to bare his manhood. The redhead wolfed down the head of Dee's dick, angled her neck, dove for a deep throat—and thwacked her forehead against the brunette, who was already slurping up his shaft and pawing at his balls. Great… It grew difficult to distract himself from the all the tongues and teeth, the flashes of flesh, the funk of savaged sex, and especially the two pairs of lips and four hands mindlessly muscling for rank and territory on his package. …Zombie cockfight.
Update 01/25/07
Yves risked a peek over Raspberry's head. CeeCee dined, poised and regal, on Black Cherry's dwindling gel. Black Cherry swooned but could not escape the amber woman's engulfing embrace. CeeCee pressed forward, swelling as she drew in more and more crimson gel-flesh, a plus-sized vampire gowned in a muumuu of many colors. Black Cherry evanesced in spewing plumes, shuddering orgiastic with every rupture from her core. CeeCee's gourmandizing. His gorge rose at the thought. ["…my compliments to the chef, Yves. That was choice…"] He turned aside.
His silver Jeep squat sideways a few yards away. The little truck looked like someone pulled a Thelma-and-Louise and drove it off a cliff. Yves squinted. Abstract green shapes, indistinct emerald cones and jade crescents, tumbled and bumped against the plastic rear window. He saw no sign of Nyx or Ursula.
"Hey, Dee," he called, twisting. Raspberry settled in his lap. "Listen, Dee, Eurydice is having trouble putting herself back to…whatthefuck?"
The yellow SUV sat in shadow under the overpass. Dee sprawled on its skewed roof, buried under three mindfucked co-eds. A redhead tried to sixty-nine him to death. She was thwarted by a busty blonde, standing on the SUV's hood and pushing the redhead's ass up with both hands while giving Dee a suffocating tongue-bath. A brunette curled around Dee's legs and battled the redhead over who could gobble Dee's cock the deepest and longest before coming up for air. So that's public fuckability, Yves thought. "Dee, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" The world can't really work this way, can it?
Dee edged an arm out from under the redhead's thighs. He nudged the blonde's chin away from his face, uprooting her from his mouth. The blonde slavered, puckering like a fish out of water. Dee spread his fingers to hold her at bay and she nursed wetly on his thumb. "Trying not to ejaculate. Failing. Got any ideas?"
"Stop fucking and start fighting. Knock their heads together or something." Yves said. Dee's expression curdled. "What? Why not? Oh, Christ, is this some 'great power, great responsibility,' comic book morality crap? Or just Dark Age chauvinism?"
"It's Silver Age." The chill in Dee's voice dropped below freezing. "Got any other ideas?"
Yves thought for a second, then turned to goo girl warming his lap. "Raz, you said something before. About Nyx saving us from being buried in zombie pussy, remember?" Raspberry nodded, eyes glued on CeeCee. "What happens to one of Black Cherry's skank-bots when she's distracted?"
"Automatic pilot," Raspberry answered, sounding robotic herself.
"Dee," Yves said. "They're on automatic pilot, whatever that means. Can you use that?"
The two girls feasting on Dee's dick settled into a relentless, counterpoint rhythm. The brunette humped his leg. The redhead straining to smother Dee with her ass again, but the blonde's grip on the redhead's ass held and kept it aloft. The blonde crooned and deep throated Dee's thumb. Dee twitched, sweating. "Got…one…chance…" he said, raising his free arm.
"You're loving this," Yves chided.
Dee wrapped his free hand around one of the blonde's wrists and slid it toward the center of the redhead's ass. The blonde did not protest or stop slobbering on Dee's other thumb. Her fingers slid into the redhead's ass-crack. Dee let go. The blonde stared blankly down at him but her fingers fondled the redhead's ass.
Dee muttered, "Bingo," and moved the blonde's other hand over the camel toe formed by the redhead's tight jeans' seam pressing into her vulva. The blonde absent-mindedly pressed two slender fingers against the seam, tracing little circles. The redhead stopped straining and started bucking her hips from side to side. She groaned, mouth full of cock.
"You've got to be kidding me," Yves said, watching Dee unbuckle the redhead's belt. "This is your plan?" Dee pulled down on the redhead's zipper. "I said they were on automatic pilot, not bi-curious." Dee unzipped the redhead's fly not halfway before the blonde grabbed the belt and hauled the redhead's pants down.
"Whoa," Yves said. The redhead wore no panties. Her bare ass bobbled free, shiny and wet with sweat and sex. "Wow, um…" The blonde squirmed her thumb over the clitoral hood hidden in a trimmed tuft of fiery red hair and sank two fingers third-knuckle deep between swollen labia. "That's, uh…" Dee hoisted his suckled thumb upward. The blonde followed, keeping her mouth locked around his flesh, until the top of her head bumped against the redhead's butt. She spat out Dee's thumb like it were old gum, clawed the redhead's thighs and latched her lips on the redhead's pussy.
Yves gave up. Maybe the world doesn’t work this way for everybody, but it sure as shit does for Dee. "Good plan, Dee."
The blonde went tongue-spelunking. The redhead pulled herself off his cock to howl her pleasure. Dee propped himself up, lightning fast, plucked the brunette's face away from his balls, and very gently pressed the redhead's and brunette's foreheads together. The two girls gazed deep into each other's eyes for a moment, then soul-kissed with a manic ferocity, arms entwining in a desperate clinch.
"And that," Dee said, shaking his leg out from under the brunette. She took the opportunity to scoot close to the redhead and peel off her tee-shirt. Dee slipped off the roof feet-first, doing up his pants in the process. "Is how Deiter fucking Detwiler knocks heads," he finished as he touched down on the pavement, adjusting the crotch of his sweatpants in a meager attempt at modesty.
The blonde scrambled onto the roof of the yellow SUV, shucking her shirt. Discarded skank-wear pattered down around the vehicle.
Dee jogged over to CeeCee. The amber woman swallowed down the last of Black Cherry, noshing on a literal piece of ass like slice of watermelon. "CeeCee," Dee said, beaming, "you're amazing. How long can…" His face fell. "CeeCee?"
CeeCee swayed. Her gel-flesh churned with licks of red and black brume. "Not long, honey," she said. She glanced up, not at Dee, but at Raspberry, and added, "Master."
Raspberry spoke. "Back in the kitchen, you said you would never eat Black Cherry, only me." Her face was a child's and Yves thought she might cry. "Why not?" She sounded so plaintive Yves could not resist hugging her to him. "Why now?"
CeeCee's weary smile was stained the color of blood oranges and cinnamon. "Because it costs too much nanomek," she answered. Her canary-yellow eyes misted over. "And I knew I'd have to do it to save your fool life someday." Her misty eyes dimmed into a dull, abyssal black. When she spoke again, her voice as not entirely her own. "And I think I can only do it once."
Update 01/28/07
"Hold out as long as you can, CeeCee" Dee said, " and we'll stick to the original plan. Yves. You mobile?"
Yves nodded, making the world spin. He fought to stay upright and nodded until the vertigo went away.
"Alright, you get Raz and your own ass the Hell out of here." He turned to CeeCee. The amber woman's face scrunched and fists trembled. Her gel-flesh reddened. "I'll take care of the rest," he said.
"Fuck you," Raspberry spat, "I am not leaving CeeCee." Her brow furrowed. "What original plan?"
Yves consoled her as Dee hustled over to the Jeep. "We're just going a little bit back down the road where we came, that's all. Can you walk?"
Dee stuck his head in the Jeep's skyward-pointing, driver side window. Yves heard several muffled voices in a murmurr of quick conversation. "Raz," Yves said, giving her the gentlest of shakes, "can you walk?"
She pulled her shoulders out of his arms. "How the fuck should I know, motherfucker? I've never been this motherfucking low on fucking nanomek before. Besides, if I walk..." Her anger dissolved into tears. "If I walk away from CeeCee right now, like this, I'd die, I'd just die. Yves, what are we going to do?"
"Stick to the original plan," Yves told her before calling out to Dee. "We good?"
Dee pulled his head out of the Jeep's window. Lime green frosting ringed his mouth. A black lip-print of a chaste kiss adorned his forehead like some ceremonial third eye. "We're good." He shuffled to the rear of the Jeep, testing handholds.
Raspberry sniffled. "What original plan?"
Dee found a handhold and pushed. The Jeep scrapped forward. Dee blinked and started, an expression Yves readily identified as Dee's Holy-shit-that-was-easy face. Yves glanced at CeeCee. Her eyes were jammed shut, but he knew that did not mean anything. Two big, ludicrous lumps of amber gelatin gathered on her, like sideways Bactrian camel humps. He decided to risk it. He pointed left, then circled his finger around to the right, and brought his palm down flat.
"I thought I screwed that up," Raspberry said. The Jeep inched nearer to the mouth of the overpass, trailing bits of metal, glass, and streaks of silver paint.
"Black Cherry doesn't know Dee like I do, no matter what the psycho-bitch thinks," Yves told her. "Watch." Yves pointed left. Raspberry followed his finger, saw the little copse of trees felled by the preternatural vigor of Dee and Eurydice's doggy-styling less than two hours earlier. Yves circled his finger around to the right. Raspberry followed it, as if hypnotized. Yves ended up pointing at the concrete pylon with the lavender-stained pizza-sized hole eaten into its face.
Yves brought his hand down flat.
Raspberry thought for a moment, her face blank. She paled to a lavender gray and titled her head up to gawk at the highway above them. "Oh, fuck me."
"Hopefully, it won't come to that," Yves said. He tried to stand with the lavender girl in his arms but his legs kept folding up under him, or the road kept slipping around beneath his feet. He could not tell which.
Raspberry managed a small laugh—"Ha"—but her eyes were wild and worried. Dee shoved the Jeep out from under the overpass' shadow. "Yves. Get up." The humps on CeeCee's back thinned and stretched, first into discs, then webbed wings. "Get up, Yves." Dee pushed until the Jeep listed in on the far side of the on-ramp adjacent to the overpass. "Get up, babe," Raspberry pled, her arms trapped inside the overshirt tourniquet holding her together. "We gotta go."
Yves hung his head. "I'm so tired, Raz. There are things you don't know about me, either."
CeeCee's eyelids flittered up. The black, polished coal buttons of her eyes were too small for her round, wide face, fixing her visage in an inhuman, silent but perpetual scream. "Dee," she said, arms searching blind. "Master. I. Black Cherry." She fought to hiss out each word. "I'm lying. She's lying. Black Cherry. About Galatea."
Update 01/31/07
Yves sat up fast. Raspberry sloshed against his lap. Dee whirled around. Come on, Dee, Yves thought. Keep it together, don't fuck this up. He watched Dee watch CeeCee struggle for control of her own mouth. If there was ever a time for one of your hallmark flashes of intuition, it's now. Yves realized he was holding his breath.
CeeCee spluttered and coughed out words. "I didn't…she…"
Dee's open palm shot up. "That's enough, CeeCee. You're running out of nanomek and I need you to do something else."
"But she never—"
Dee's new voice crackled in the air. "Enough!" The yellow SUV's car alarm blared, hazard lights flashing before the alarm wound down. The three sorority sisters, a half-naked pile of tangled limbs and lips, cried out in lusty chorus. CeeCee quailed and fell silent.
Yves exhaled, slumping. Raspberry, bound by Yves' overshirt, flopped over to peer up at him. Yves shook his head. Black Cherry can't know what Dee knows, he thought, but only whispered, "Later." If she decides CeeCee's spoiled her fun, it's all over. "After I get you out of here."
"CeeCee," Dee said, pointing to the moist three-way on the SUV's roof, "Can you control them? Through Black Cherry? You've got to get them out of here."
Nascent claws, little red nubs, hooked out from the raw scarlet wings stretching from CeeCee's back. The wings battered the air, powerful but uncoordinated, each attempting flight independent of the other. CeeCee lurched, arms raised. The three coeds floundered their slippy way down to the ground. Only the brunette had retained her panties. The greasy silk underwear looked like she had worn it for weeks on end. The three sorority sisters collected their clothes in silence and shambled down the road, extras from a Romero movie.
The embryonic wing-claws grew long and sharp. One wing stabbed down, its claw piercing the pavement. The whorls of crimson and black sucked inward, gradually draining from CeeCee's turbulent surface, leaving behind a sallow yellow. Dee paced around her, keeping out of striking distance of the free wing, walking in a careful semi-circle until he stood with the purple-stained pylon directly behind him. "Aw, shit," Raspberry quavered as Dee backed up a step, then two. "We've gotta go right fucking now."
Yves hoisted the lavender girl in his arms and rose to one knee. His vision danced with silvered sparks of snow and fire. Oh God, he thought, listing his weight against his leg, not an aura. Not now. He blinked but the colorless pyrotechnics persisted. At least that explains the way I've been feeling; I'm not cracking up. The world filled with silent video static. I'm pre-migraine.
The lavender girl stretched to plant a soothing kiss on his neck. "What are the eight forces that sustain creation, Yves? I forgot."
Yves set his jaw. "Movement," he said, and stood straight.
"And stillness," Raspberry said, nestled against his chest.
CeeCee's free wing flopped in a wide circle before slamming into the pavement. Licks of red and black whipped around the amber woman's surface and vanishing inward. Dee took another step backward.
"Extension," Yves called, striding forward.
"And contraction," Raspberry answered, hugging herself tight until she fit perfectly in his arms.
The red wings clawed at the pavement. CeeCee rocked forward to stay on her feet. Her black button eyes sunk into her head before she squeezed them shut. A red bolus rose up on her back between her wings. Dee stepped backward again. The pavement beneath his feet inclined to join the pylon behind him.
"Unification," Yves said, and broke into a run.
"And division," Raspberry whispered, gazing over his shoulder as the distance between them and the amber woman grew. "I love you, CeeCee. Run. Run."
CeeCee burst like a water balloon. Black Cherry fell away, fully formed and furious, sweating blood-nectar from every pore. CeeCee's shapeless remnants slithered over the pavement in honeyed waves. Black Cherry sprang to her feet, howling in rage, wings swooping in for the kill.
"Cherry…" Dee's voice reverberated and the scarlet girl staggered.
Yves cleared the mouth of the overpass. The mid-morning sun overwhelmed the fading aural sparks. "Solidity," he said, and turned about.
Dee stood with his back to the tall, ferroconcrete pylon. Black Cherry swiveled to face him. Sanguine honey dripped from her quivering wing claws, her arms, her pouting mouth and flush sex. "Master."
Dee raised his arms high, left hand curled around his right fist. He poured every ounce of his strength into a backswing. His fist smashed into the pylon, blasting off chunks of cement spiked with shorn rebar. Yves ears rang in the roar. There was an instant of quiet.
"And fluidity," Raspberry said. CeeCee flowed away from the overpass in a golden gush.
A jagged crack raced up the side of the pylon with a ripple of sharp noise, overlapping pistol shots. The pylon split along its length. A half-column of concrete ripped free of rebar and thumped down onto the road hard enough to bounce Yves off the ground and knock the silver Jeep an inch forward. The bridging highway above rocked on its foundations.
Black Cherry gazed upward, worry melting into wonder and delight, as the pylon began its slow topple toward her. Her lips curled in a lazy smile, heavy lidded eyes sliding shut. "Oh, Master."
"Splat," Dee said, and several hundred tons of concrete pylon crashed down upon them both.
Update 02/04/07
02/04/07-1
The structure fractured into ragged slabs as it fell and struck the ground. Deafened, Yves felt the sound pressure of the gradual collapse as a low, lingering thunderclap. Dee and Black Cherry disappeared in an acrid storm of grit and pulverized rock. Yves huddled on the pavement, drawing himself around Raspberry as best he could. When his hearing returned, he realized Raspberry had been soliloquizing at him, words harsh but smile warm.
"I'm made out of Jell-O, dumb-fuck. A little jiggle like this can't hurt me. Good thing I'm too scared to cum, though. All this hugging and sappy bullshit's got my cooze so creamy I’d frig away my last nanomek if I could. Black Cherry's right. I wanna stuff Dee's cock up my cunt so bad I get cross-eyed just thinking about it, but to tell you the truth, babe." The lavender girl shook her head. Concrete fines and dust nucleated in her hair, turning orchid petals into gray sandpaper. "You've made me a fag-hag. If you're looking for a beard, I'm your bitch. We could get a little apartment, you could do all your fudge-packing at home, and I'd felch all the jizz I'd ever need out of your ass."
"Alright, alright," Yves said, loosening his hold on the leering goo girl. "I can hear again. Now would you please shut your filthy fucking mouth. Where's CeeCee?"
Raspberry nodded to the left but CeeCee hulloed, "Over here, honey." CeeCee sprawled on the asphalt a few paces down the road, a heap of yellow cream domes, as if someone had carved a reclining Buddha out of the world's biggest butter pat and left it melting on the pavement. "I'm just going to lie here awhile, if you don't mind."
Yves asked her, "Are you okay?"
"No."
"Are you going to be okay?"
"I'm not sure. I've never had so little nanomek to keep me going before. Honey, what happened? What on Earth was Dee thinking?"
Yves surveyed the wreckage. He saw no sign of Dee. A crimson puddle spread out from under the rubble, too thick and too fast to be Dee's blood unless Dee's nanomek had changed him in ways Yves did not want to think about. "Same as you," he told CeeCee, "to buy time. Time for Eurydice to put herself back together." He turned to the Jeep tucked beside the onramp. "Time for Nyx and Ursula to…" He squinted but could glean no clues from the sideways vehicle. "…to do whatever the Hell it is they've been doing in there. Time for us to retreat." Yves heard a heavy thud. One of the largest broken slabs of concrete shivered, raising a cloud of fines. "Time for Dee to go mano y psicópata with Cherry."
Raspberry still dangled in Yves arms. "But you're not going anywhere, are you?"
Yves clucked his tongue, watching the puddle ripple and wax into a pool, incarnadine and shadow entwined. "Nope."
She turned and glared at the growing pool, her eyes hard as true amethyst. "Then neither am I."
"You couldn't drag me away with wild horses," CeeCee said, staring up at the sky before admitting, "You'd need a bucket."
The thudding stopped and the slab grated over the pavement, a stone sarcophagus groaning open. Pale fingers reached up from beneath, found purchase, tensed, and pushed. The slab progressed another few inches before the concrete beneath the fingers abraded into gravel. The fingers splayed and scrabbled but disappeared downward. Dee's muted swearing floated up. "Fucking physics!"
"Dee," Yves called out, amazed, relieved, but somehow, utterly unsurprised. "We're okay."
"Yves?" Dee's fingers appeared from beneath the slab again, their hunt for a handhold far more frantic. "Christ, Yves. How many times do I have to say, 'Get out of here' today before you actually get out of here?"
The ruby pool drew in on itself, doming in the middle. "I've got a few minutes," Yves lied. Dee's fingers danced around the bottom perimeter of the slab, where the crumbing concrete met the pavement. "Listen; are you squashed flat or something?"
"No, dammit, I'm harder than ferroconcrete, but ferro-fucking-concrete is harder than asphalt."
"You didn't lie down?" Yves asked.
"No, I didn't think of it! In comic books you don't have to worry about this kind of shit!"
"What the fuck are you two dickweeds talking about?" Raspberry demanded.
Yves stood up. His elbows and shoulders burned from carrying Raspberry but he ignored it. The ruby dome rose into a ball. We may have to run after all. "Our man of steel's been driven into the ground like a steel railroad spike. He's buried alive in the hardpan."
"Bedrock," Dee corrected, annoyed, from a Dee-sized hole in the road. "Granite, I think."
"Who gives a shit?" Raspberry bounced in impatience. "Just punch your way out and kick psycho-twat's ass summore."
"I'm working on it," Dee said. Yves heard the crump of crumbling rock. "This isn't easy. I'm no Uma Thurman. How much time have I got left, Yves?"
"Master." Black Cherry unfurled, a rose blooming wet with morning dew. Her wings drooped, glistening and unformed. Her movements were twitchy and insectile. "You hurt me, Master." She paced in a little circle then folded up over a broken slab. "You hurt me so much." She rolled onto her back, luxuriating in a post-coital daze. "So much."
Dee was silent for a moment. "Thanks a bunch, Yves." The sounds of an avalanche in miniature spilled out from the hole.
Black Cherry glanced around. Her coy smile upended into a confused frown. "Master? Where are you?" Her head wings distended but were still too gluey to separate from her pageboy haircut and just pulsed obscenely. She lazed over onto her tummy and skootched to the end of the slab, streaking the concrete in a florid swath of fluid. She peeped over the edge. "Master?" She giggled down. "Oh, there you are. My noviluninium is waning, Master. Are you ready for me now? Or do you want me to play with Yves again. It's your choice, Master. Just as before." Her sly gaze flicked over Yves before she spoke to the hole in the pavement. "Is it time?"
02/04/07-2
Raspberry snorted, a guttural ch-hock! noise bubbled in her throat. She stuck her violet tongue out from between her lips, aiming carefully. The purple stains on the overshirt wrapped around her welled and spread. Raspberry grew cold in Yves arms. He pinched her as hard as he could on the neck. She coughed and swallowed. Yves felt the soft, radiant warmth rekindle in her core and he relaxed his grip on her neck.
Something clanked inside the silver Jeep. Black Cherry pivoted on her ripe bottom, scissor-kicking to sit up with legs folded. She prized her diminutive wings away from her hair, pointing them at the Jeep. Strings and filaments of gel drifted, lighter than air, in a hazy halo around her head.
"What did you do that for?" Raspberry wheezed at Yves.
"Don't you dare die for me or Dee," Yves told her.
A slim, lustrous black arm sprouted skyward from the driver's side window of the sideways vehicle. Its smooth, conical fingers and thumb fluxed into raptorial claws before hooking down into the canvas top.
"Ah," Black Cherry sighed, "of course. Just in the nick of time, too, imagine that." A second arm followed the first, fist clutching a torn book page and raising it high. "Our little heroine." Black Cherry peered at the nonsensical, spiraling scrawls of arcane formulae scribbled in black fountain pen ink across the crinkled paper. She shrugged it off. "She's the one I came for, Master. She helped you get away. She needs to die for that." The clawed hand flexed as the obsidian girl hauled herself into view. "She needs to die today…Wait." The scarlet girl bounded to her feet, her head wings pricked up like the ears of a startled cat. "Who the fuck are you?"
Update 02/05/07
Wide, red, oval-rimmed glasses, lenses chipped into splinters and flakes, sat askew on the obsidian girl's pert little nose. Long, plaited pigtails framed a porcelain white, china doll face and arced down into the Jeep in ropey licorice braids. Her liquid lips glossed in ebon paint, a burnished onyx choker ringed her ivory neck above a cashmere poncho. A narrow but deep laceration slashed across a high, angular cheekbone. A single bead of jet black blood rolled down a cheek as pale as milk.
The obsidian goth and the scarlet girl squared off in silence.
Wings of webby ink unfolded in sharp planes and dizzying geodesic formations from the obsidian goth's back. Wings holding her in place, she razored the poncho apart with a single slash of her clawed fingers. Strips of soft cloth fell away to reveal a stygian second skin. Vitreous iridescence accentuated every curve of bone and swell of flesh, a living glaze of volcanic glass.
Black Cherry was the first to blink and step back. "What are you?"
The obsidian goth whipped off her useless glasses. She closed her eyes, daubed two gloved fingers against them. A perfect mask of black mascara coated her eyelids. Her eyes flicked open, their whites filling with starless night.
"We—are—U—Nyx," she breathed, and took flight.
Update 02/08/07
"Oh, come on," Yves said. Unyx sailed high into the air on billowing, membranous wings. "Everyone's a superhero but me."
Black Cherry hunched, hands curled into fists, glaring up at Unyx through her eyelashes. Unyx dipped and dove, kite-tail braids whipping high and back. Scarlet arms thrust down and red wing claws snapped up, aiming for the tender flesh below Unyx's ribs. Crimson struck lacquered black.
Yves flinched in the agonized noise, worse than fingernails across a blackboard. Needle-sharp tips skittered over the Unyx's second skin. Black Cherry shrieked in shock and pain, threw her wings wide. Unyx bore down unhindered. Talons ripped a gash between Black Cherry's breasts. The scarlet girl's single shriek stretched long without a stop for breath.
Unyx's thick-soled go-go boots smacked into the pavement. She wrenched one arm back, drawing out an arc of sanguine gel. She punched out with the other and thwacked the torn page over Black Cherry's jagged wound. The scribbled equations and gridline charts were lost as red nectar seeped into the cheap paper. The pumping of Black Cherry's red-and-black swirled inner gel sucked the page inward.
Unyx rocked her hips and hunkered. She sprung high and away, wings whomp-whomp-whomping and thrashing the air. Her braids flew before her face as she soared backward. Black Cherry lashed out with both hands, seized the ends of Unyx's trailing braids and hauled. Unyx's neck jerked forward and down as her braids drew taut. The snarling scarlet girl smashed her fists into the pavement and Unyx slammed into the ground headfirst.
Unyx's thick choker collar liquesced, nictating into a shell over her face an instant before colliding with the ground. Black Cherry stepped over Unyx's twitching form, wings drift over the ground like falling leaves. She wound the obsidian goth's braids around both her fists. The slash in the scarlet girl's chest zippered shut and her snarl melted into a befuddled frown. Goosebumps dimpled Black Cherry's gel-flesh, making her shiver. "What's going on?"
The filigree of shadow, the skeins and spirals of Devil's Food pudding permeating her cherry gel, trembled and whirled just below Black Cherry's cardinal surface. Beneath the fading scar between her breasts, the threading black veins bent and twisted into angular shapes and loops before snapping into focus as numbers and symbols in a dozen languages, modern and ancient. Gibberish equations invaded her flesh like a mathematical virus. Tunneling worms of code crept up the curves of her breasts, encircled her dark nipples in even darker lines of sums and symbols before swarming outward. In moments her stomach and neck swam with a motile, growing tattoo inked by a demented algebra student. "What did you do to me?"
Unyx pawed the road but said nothing. Equations scrolled into Black Cherry's arms and legs. "I said…" The scarlet girl yanked on Unyx's braids, swung her up and over and back down hard, spraying chunks of asphalt into the air. Black wings wilted and folded up into lumps on her shoulders. "…What did you do to me?" Black Cherry finished her demand in a panicked, high pitched screech.
She hoisted Unyx up by the hair to look her eye to eye. The black candy shell around Unyx's face peeled away to reveal Ursula, pale and unconscious. The wings on Unyx's shoulders melted and molded into a second pair of reedy arms, spindle neck and blank, egg-shaped head. Nyx emerged to confront her creator. She wrapped her arms around Ursula's neck in a fierce, desperate hug, conveying more affection, anger, and defiance in that single gesture than anyone could speak in a thousand words.
"Fine," Black Cherry sighed. She unreeled Urusla's braids until the goth girl dangled to the ground. The growing math-tattoo breached the scarlet surface of Black Cherry's wings. Tension gathered in her gel as she prepared a final swing. "Then die."
"Do it," Ursula mumbled, eyelids fluttering, eyes rolled back.
Nyx craned her neck. One gaunt arm raised, too thin to support a hand. The tapered tip curved into a basalt, razor-sharp hook.
"If you say so," Black Cherry shrugged, the living tattoo encroaching the very tips of her wings. She rocked her arms back, dragging Ursula along the pavement.
Nyx brought her hooked arm down so quick it whistled. She hesitated at the last instant, hook trembling above Ursula's creamy throat. Her pitchy skin grayed to a matte black.
Ursula grimaced. "Do it!"
Black Cherry poured power into her throw. Nyx turned her head, and, shuddering, slashed sideways. Black Cherry toppled backward. Ursula and Nyx skidded across the pavement.
Yves found his voice. "Oh, God, no."
"Did it work?" asked Dee from his hole in the pavement.
"Did what work?" Raspberry cried. "Ursula's dead!"
"Lookit," Yves whispered.
"You fucking asshole." Raspberry's tears burned little holes in Yves shirt. "You should have let me nuke the cunt. I don't care if…"
"For once in your fucking life would you just shut your stupid fucking mouth and lookit?" Yves hissed.
Raspberry purpled, then turned and lookited. Black Cherry sat up, perplexed. She held two long, thick black braids, one in each hand. They danced in the air, a total six feet worth of plaited ponytail, their ends shorn shear. The living tattoo completed a full circuit, and the scarlet girl was covered head to toe in a madman's idea of math homework.
Ursula propped herself up, blinking sleepily. The remains of her ponytails stuck out straight from either side of her head for a good half foot before puffing out into black pompom tufts.
"Well, shit," Raspberry grumped, "She's cuter than ever now."
Update 02/12/07
"Then Ursula's okay," Dee said, sounding relieved. "Nyx too?" A rampart of granite pebbles and chips encircled the hole in the pavement. "And did it work?"
"I think Ursula's okay," Yves answered. The goth girl plopped back down in an exhausted huff onto the pavement. "More weary than wounded. Nyx is looking pretty gray, though, like a wool sweater. And I have no idea if anything worked because you didn't clue me in on your plan this time." More pebbles appeared. "Speaking of which, what the Hell are you doing? Trying to dig upwards?"
Dee's fingertips waggled above the ring of rock. "I've barely got one arm free down here and I'm trying to make some room. Superhuman strength is pretty useless when you're pinned in place by plate-freaking-tectonics." A finger stabbed out at an angle. "What's happening to Black Cherry?"
"She's covered in that magic square number stuff," Yves said. "And she's just…sitting there."
"Maybe it did work, then," Dee said.
"Master?" Black Cherry dropped the severed braids, tried to stand, but her wings sagged. She stepped on one wing and flumped back down on her ass. The wings on her head shriveled and paled. "Master?"
Yves adjusted Raspberry's weight in his arms and took the edge of the fire in his shoulders. "What were U and Nyx trying to do? Magic, right? Not number games. Real magic." He tried to follow the lines of numerical ciphers wrapped around Black Cherry's body but it made him dizzy, looking less like crazed math and more like an elegant but incomprehensible foreign language. "But magic to do what?"
A face hidden by a drab olive hoodie and green, wraparound Onasis sunglasses poked out of the driver's side window. "To take the Black out of Black Cherry," Eurydice answered, pushing herself up by the palms and flipping down onto the pavement.
Black Cherry wobbled to her feet, gawping at Eurydice. Her head wings furled inward and melted away. The wings on her back faded and shrunk until they were little more than the pink, toy devil-wings of a Halloween costume. The green girl turned to her.
"Hello, baby sister," Eurydice said.
Update 02/14/07
Black Cherry twittered, pointing at Eurydice but peering over her shoulder. "You made another one, Master?" She shook her head. "See how replaceable she is. Not like me. There's nothing like me. I'm nothing." Her bravado failed. "I'm alone." She glanced about, desperate and lost. "Be with me." Her gaze fell on Eurydice, darted to Yves and Raspberry, to CeeCee, then Ursula and Nyx, before circling back to Eurydice. "Become me. Name me."
Ursula rolled onto her side, reaching for the hem of Eurydice's fatigues. "Hurry. The binding won't last. She's strong." She smiled before slipping back into exhaustion. "Just like you."
Eurydice nodded, pulling away the glasses and the hood. Jellied dreadlocks tumbled free. Black Cherry tried to sneer. "So young, he made you so young this time. Just like I remember you." Black Cherry pressed her palm over her mouth. "I remember you? I do." This time, her hand trembled as she pointed. "I know you…"
"You know me of old," Eurydice finished for her. "Yes. Things echo. But echoes have never been enough. Not for you."
Black Cherry backpedaled, almost tripping herself up on crumbling cement. "I don't understand."
"Neither did I at first." Eurydice unzipped her hoodie, molding the pliant garment into a peculiar sash, leaving her left breast bare. "Now that I've seen you, though, everything's so clear. We've done this so many times, you and I." She stepped closer. "But things are different this time. Things can be different, if you let them." Black Cherry only stared wide eyed and silent. Eurydice pressed forward. "You don't have to be alone. Be with us. Become yourself." She held out her hand. "Adrasteia."
Black Cherry fumbled backward. "Ide," she gasped, and at first Yves thought she said, I Dee, or maybe, Idly. She bumped into a fallen slab and sat down hard. "It is you, Ide," she said.
Eurydice reached out to her, smiling. "Call me Eurydice."
"What the fuck is this shit?" Raspberry called out. Eurydice turned and shushed her but Raspberry just stared. "Jesus fuck, check out those tits."
Yves whispered, "Nursemaids."
"What?" Raspberry asked.
"They were sisters," Yves answered. ["...Hello, baby sister..."] "Nursemaids." Another piece clicked into place in the puzzle. ["...That depends, is Cherry Cupcake Dee's psycho bitch ex-girlfriend from Hell..."]
"Black Cherry's always been the eldest before," Yves explained. ["...No one's ever gone lime first time before..."] "But not this time. That's what's different." Eurydice smiled, opened her hands to Black Cherry again.
"Dee made Galatea first," Yves said.
"Wait. Nursemaids? Of what?" Raspberry narrowed her eyes at the ample curve of Eurydice's bare breast. "Buffalo?"
"Gods."
"Names," Black Cherry said. "Why do you have so many names?"
Eurydice's brow crinkled in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Ide," Black Cherry said, and stood up. "Eurydice. Galatea." The little wings on her back flushed red. "Shamhat. Meliboea." Black Cherry advanced, her sneer returning. Eurydice dropped back. "Eglė. Marya." Two curved horns budded from the top of the scarlet girl's head, opening as embryonic wings.
"I'm clueless," Raspberry hissed.
From her muddle on the pavement, CeeCee said, "We know, honey. We know."
Eurydice zippered her hoodie. "Adrasteia, please. I used up so much nanomek to put myself back together after the crash, just to talk to you. Listen to me, please."
Black Cherry tipped her head, listening to some distant voice. The wings on her back grew, gorged on blood red gel. "Zeus loved you best."
Eurydice shook her head. "You don't understand, Adrasteia."
"That's not my name," Black Cherry muttered. The numbers and symbols tattooed on her skin writhed and danced. "Zeus loved you best. Heracles loved you best. Perseus loved you best." The little wings on her head spread atremble. "Dee loves…They all loved you best!"
"No." Eurydice fell back against the Jeep. "You can't love what you don't trust. And, in the end, none of them trusted us. Ever. Because of you," Eurydice added, eyes brimming with tears and defiance, "Adrasteia."
Update 02/15/07
"That's not my name!" The mathematical formulae binding Black Cherry's flesh distorted, wavered, and finally faded into black veins marbling crimson gel, devoid of pattern or meaning. Her great wings opened, spanned the road, and a scarlet curtain of crushed velvet dropped between Yves and Eurydice. A battle cry built in Yves' throat.
"Hey, fruitcake!"
Yves clapped his mouth shut and spun about.
Tomoe strolled up the double yellow line in the center of the access road, white blouse ruffling in the sudden wind, little black miniskirt hugging above her knees. She dismissed Yves with a wave, dark eyes shining. "Pfft, not you." She pointed. "That fruitcake. The crazy lady with wings."
Black Cherry slumped. "This nick-of-time thing really gets tedious. Who ever heard of a team that doesn't team up? Ah, well, who is it now." She turned. The curtain rose on Eurydice, squashed against the silver Jeep, trying to peek around Black Cherry's head-wings. Black Cherry stood dumbstruck before stuttering, "Tiamat?"
"Say, there's an old name." Tomoe folded her arms. "Who's been giving the crazy lady flashbacks?"
Eurydice poked up a hand. "That'd be me. Sorry."
From his hole, Dee asked, "Are you okay, Eurydice?"
"Yeah. Plan B didn't work, though, so get your ass outta there."
"Working on it." Chunks of granite flew up. "Just a minute longer."
Black Cherry shrugged with arms and all four wings. "Tiamat," she whispered, pacing this way and that in the middle of the road, eyeing Tomoe from every angle. "You can't be here."
"No rule against it," Tomoe said, one black pump tapping on the pavement.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Raspberry asked.
"Me?" She met Yves gaze, matched his poker face. "Nothing."
Yves smirked, "Ah." He went down on one knee and lay Raspberry down onto the pavement.
"That, that's right," Black Cherry said, confidence returning. "You can't interfere."
"Yep. I can't interfere. Now there's a rule I never break."
"What're you doing?" Raspberry whispered to Yves.
"Don't worry," he whispered back. "You'll be fine. Besides, my arms have gone numb and I think I'm slipping a disk."
Wing claws clicked together over Black Cherry's head. "You can't interfere. So what are you going to do?" She edged closer to Tomoe. "Stand there and watch?"
"Pretty much," Tomoe answered, "yeah."
Yves could not take any more. "You're asking the wrong questions." He shook his head, wore an idiot grin. "You stupid psycho-bitch."
Black Cherry shot him a worried glance. In the distance, an engine revved up.
"The question is," Yves said as the engine grew louder, "how did she get here so fast?"
"Oh." Tomoe brightened. She stepped to the side, inspecting a finger nail. "I drove."
A rose Mini Cooper raced around the bend in the access road. It bounced up a jagged slab of fallen concrete, soared through the air, and bore down upon Black Cherry, car horn meep-meeping. The car's grimacing oval grill rippled and split, thrust out a single, diamond-tipped, ramrod spike.
Black Cherry reared back, eyes bugging. "Oh, shi—"
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