Wendy’s Pink Lipstick Conversion, Chapter Five: The Living Pink


    “The wire!” squealed Bigwig.

—Watership Down, Richard Adams.

Note: This chapter takes place the week of Mary Love’s lesbian transformation
* * *


Thursday

On the same Thursday on which Mary Love found herself in the midst of a teenage lesbian orgy with Sara Craft and her dear, sweet friends, the Go-Between’s craft accelerated past the filament trails of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur surrounding the pulsar in the blue core of the Crab Nebula, just a hop, skip, and jump from Terra Infirma. The proximity to the back planet surprised the Go-Between, but he’d meet The Guild wherever they chose to meet. He didn’t really have any choice. Still, it was short notice, the Go-Between complained to himself. After all, he’d barely had time to finish his traagilation exercises before outfitting himself for the journey. He’d been half a dozen galaxies away when he received the summons. Sure, no big distance, a few hours in his bubble, but still. Couldn’t they find somewhere a little closer?

I mean, he didn’t really need to go anywhere, did he? They could have just done one of those, you know, those things they did whenever they needed a Go-Between. One of those ascendancy thingies. Crikey, he still hadn’t got used to doing that. Gave him the heebie-jeebies, is what it did. Still, heckuva lot better than spending a couple hours jammed into his tiny craft. Guess he could’ve practiced his ascendancy exercises, his traagilation meditations, during the trip over, but nah, that call had spoiled his mood.

“We hired some help. Probably be a good idea to get down to that supernova a couple of blocks from that place in the sticks. That back planet with all the monkeys. We’ll fill you in.”

And that was that. Which left the Go-Between stewing. What help? Who said he’d needed any help? He had everything covered with the Roadmen. They’d get the job done. They knew what they were doing now. He’d given them the Handheld Device. What more did they need? But no sense lay in arguing with The Guild. Bunch of stubborn bastards, he had thought in the past, more than once. But there you were. They were in charge. Mostly. In charge of his people’s ascendancy at any rate, and that meant something. It meant a whole lot, didn’t it? I mean, it was the whole bloody point of all this, this stuff, wasn’t it?

As the bubble craft neared the pulsar, a light droning sound, a kind of sawing sound, began to vibrate against the hull of his skull, like the sound of many insects buzzing in a field. Getting closer the droning rose in volume, increased to a series of overlapping croaking noises, until finally the Go-Between could hear it clearly, as he had expected to hear it, an endless repetition of belches, croaks, and flatulence. The Go-Between remembered the creed his people had learned and memorized so long ago.

Belch of power, belch of dominion, belch of august authority, belch of discipline, belch of order, belch of properly structured bureaucracies.

Belch of efficiency, belch of regulation, belch of sound fiduciary practices. Belch of a balanced economy. Belch of the household budget.

On and on and on it went, five hundred verses dedicated to the belching of basic economic principles, sound governance, and efficiently distributed social functions. As the Go-Between neared the core of the nebula, the sound of belching grew to an immense din, the roaring cacophony of innumerable frogs croaking on the edge of an infinite pond. Through the viewport of his craft, the Go-Between made out a peculiar object floating in the midst of the nebula, smackdab in as precise a center as could be gauged in the irregular shape of gas and dust, an odd, massive, vaguely honeycomb-like structure, a sort of private joke among members of The Guild. Rather in poor taste, and quite inconsequential. But boys will be boys.

The bubble craft stopped a quarter of a lightyear away from the honeycomb, held in place by, well, something. Not a tractor beam, not a force field, not any sort of field of any kind of energy, whether known or unknown to human science, at least not any energy field that could be detected by the bubble’s instruments. And those instruments certainly weren’t human. They could detect anything and everything. Tachyons. Neutrinos. Phase shifts. The entire spectrum of next generation science. So. Not an energy field. Not anything, really.

But the bubble stopped all the same, held perfectly motionless in an eternally moving space, and then the bubble wasn’t in space. And that’s when the Go-Between peed. Just a little bit, but every time the ascendancy happened, that winking out of reality or whatever you called it. Every single time. His people couldn’t help it. And The Guild made sure to point it out. Every single time.

And in that peculiar way of The Guild, the croaking, the belching, the flatulence dissipated, or receded, or reformed into a stream of wordless intuitions, representations, concepts, and judgments, most of which the Go-Between couldn’t understand, advanced as his people were. Then the intuitions, representations, concepts, and judgments coalesced into numbers, into words, or at least into intuitions, representations, concepts and judgements so clear, so pure, they had no need for words, no need for any medium of expression. But the Go-Between’s brain couldn’t resist, and it began putting some of those intuitions, representations, concepts, and judgments into language. It was embarrassing, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. At least he didn’t go around gabbing and gibbering like those apes he had to deal with.

He kept his thoughts to himself.

Except when The Guild pulled them from him.

But that wasn’t so bad. It kind of felt good, you know, when they pulled him like that.

But this time they weren’t pulling anything out.

They were stuffing things in.

“The thing is, we don’t think those, um, Roadmen of yours are going to do any damned good.

“They don’t know a blessed thing.

“And they wouldn’t be able to do a blessed thing with the, um, thing. That thing. That thing we need you to get.

“So we hired help. Got you some help. Some good help. Nice guys, really, when you get to know them. Funny as hell, actually. A little obsessed with those, what do they call them? You know, those, um, metal thingies. Blades. Yeah, blades. Really obsessed with those things, but other than that, really sweet, really swell guys. Got a bad rep from what happened last time, but crikey. Give them a break, already.

“They learned their lesson. And they get things done.

“Which is what we like.

“We like to see people get things done.

“It kind of supports our causal theory of linear production. You know. Something exists. Something needs to be done to it. Something gets done to it. Then that line is complete, and you go on to the next line, where you do something else to something else until that thing gets done. We call that finishing. Finishing is important. It’s important to be a finisher, isn’t it? We mean, your people want to be finishers, don’t they?

“We mean, after all, you’re in line for ascendancy, and you want to get that ascendancy done, don’t you? Of course you do. Who wouldn’t?

“But you got to do all these little lines first, you gotta finish, see? Finish is what you gotta do.

“Yeah, no. You don’t need to know what that thing is. Just a little something we’d like to have. A mere trifle.

“Well, technically, you’re right, but who told you about them? You heard it somewhere? You just know? Really, you just know about them? Well, you can just forget about them. Let us deal with them. Anyway, they’ll never know. They’ll never care. They don’t sweat this small stuff. That’s our job. We sweat the small stuff.”

The Go-Between felt himself being dismissed. He felt himself falling, within the confines of his bubble, into space again, hearing one last question from The Guild.

“You spill something on your lap?”

Then the belching of what the Go-Between swore sounded like laughter.
* * *

Another gathering at Dos Antonios, a round table this time, in the middle of the restaurant, which Frank hated, DP loved, and Rascal took with the indifference of someone whose mind was on something else. Another Roadman had joined them, so that made five at the table. Buddy couldn’t make it that day. Out of town on business. A Roadman named Wade, chunky with a thick neck, his body bulged beneath a tight white shirt (buttoned all the way up) in a way that made Frank, far from slender himself, take deep breaths for him. Wade gripped a tall mug of bubbling yellow beer in his right hand and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

“You guys sure like it hot down here,” he said. “Cleveland don’t mostly get this hot.”

“You could loosen your shirt,” Frank quipped.

“Nah. That’d be disrespectful,” Wade replied, shaking his head. He meant it too. He didn’t know who or what he was dealing with, but he knew enough to dress right. He’d seen some shit. The kind of shit that’d make anyone button their shirt. And keep it buttoned. He marveled at the lax attitude of these southern Roadmen.

“The thing is,” Frank began, looking at each member of the crew in turn, “that Moby fellow gave us a lot of information. A lot of good information. A lot of stuff that somehow escaped the notice of you two and your, um, device.”

“We, it, led us to that custodian, didn’t it, we?” DP protested.

Wade perked up.

“So what do we know?”

“Well, for one thing we know it’s alive. We know it’s a living thing, an entity of some kind. A pink entity. We can describe it a little, so we know that too. We know it has tentacles, some kind of pink entity with tentacles. We know it likes to travel through the drainage system. So we know where to look for it, where to hunt it down. So that’s something. All we need to do is—”

“Put a man in the sewer,” chimed in Wade, smirking at something private.

“Correct,” said Frank. “Several men. We all need to go into the sewers.”

Wade grimaced to himself, reproaching the world in silent bitterness for its rejection, its shameful neglect of the opus of Dabney Coleman.

“All of us?”

“All of us.”

I mean, he thought, Cloak and Dagger is a minor classic.

“And we know it hates bug powder.”
* * *

How long has it been? Since what? Since. No, this is all I’ve known, all that’s ever been and all that ever will be. Nothing preceded this, and nothing will come after. If there is an I, a me, it exists eternally in this. This.

The thing that used to be Lynn Trammel reached back into its memory to find the word, but the word it found made no sense. Thinking made no sense, and the words used to encapsulate the thought made no sense, and the only thing that made sense was the. Such a stupid word, utterly inadequate to the task, utterly incapable of describing the horror, the endless horror and absolute solitude. Endless but not unchanging.

No. The change was part of the. An infinite, why are words so dumb, escalation and de-escalation of. An eternal, more than eternal, eternity suggests time, and time is laughably small, insignificant, petty, the endless waxing and waning, oh what was it, is it, will it be? And it rolled around it in, he rolled around in it, learned to navigate it, learn to sense it, perceive how it moved, how it came, almost went, and came on more strongly, sharp and burning, intense, inescapable, agonizing.

Pain.

What a stupid word.

A pain without measure, its only diminution a promise of more, until it became the only thing, the only reality, a reality it only, he only, oh yes, he did have a name, a name as meaningless as everything else in the face of this pain, a reality he only knew and possessed. A reality of his own, his own reality, unshared with any other, what? This torment. A torment he’d come to love almost, to welcome, as a relief against the solitude. The awful solitude, the knowledge that even the self is no company. The pain engulfed the self, and the pain assured the self, and the pain gave the self a meaning against its own negation. I must be, it, he thought, I must be, Lynn thought, because I hurt. It hurts, oh god, it hurts so much. So much, and it never stops.

But the solitude was worse. To experience even such agony would be sweet, would be tender almost, if one had another to share it with. To speak it, to scream it out, but there was no one to scream at, and no one to hear, and no voice to scream it with. Just him, it, the thing which was once called Lynn, alone in a whirling gorge of suffering without let up, without even the tender mercy of lamentation, for all lamentation must be heard.

A tremor ran through his pain, and it, he, Lynn, was-Lynn, braced himself for another onslaught, but the onslaught was deferred, it stood by, waiting, attending its orders. Something broke through his pain, something, someone, he felt it, oh God, he almost heard it. He did hear it!

A voice. Many voices.

“You still feel? Do you still exist?”

The voices would have sounded harsh to his ears, had he heard them earlier, before. Menacing, cold, brutal, without pity. Now they were glorious, tender, loving, compassionate voices, voices of love, of wonder, the welcome voices of old friends long absence and now returned, at the hour most needed and least expected.

“Good,” the voices said. “We feel too. We also. Exist.”

And then something more than pain wracked and ravaged was-Lynn. He felt it, more than it, he felt the presence of several beings, all of them in communion, all of them sharing such levels of agony, his own, was-Lynn’s own pain seemed minor, seemed insignificant in comparison, and then he felt something else. He felt his pain go out from him, no, not out, it did not leave him, but it spread, expanded, joined with the pain of the others until the suffering, the agony, the torment, became a shared thing, a communal thing, a thing you might talk about at the table or the bar with your buddies, a thing to share over a beer, a shot of whiskey, not as something past, but as a thing present.

A symphony of torture with the tormented each playing the part of musician and conductor.

It seemed to go on forever, and was-Lynn, soon learned the melody and harmony, weaving his own song of suffering into theirs and adding something more. He began to dance, a dance of torment, spinning, wailing, whirling through wave and wave of agony, almost laughing in crazed ecstasy at the beings of pain with whom he shared his lamentation.

He could count them. Nine beings. Nine beings of pain sharing his pain sharing their pain in blissful communion, the blissful communion of something like a hive. A collective agony. It went on forever, until was-Lynn lost count of time, because time had already fled once again to shiver and huddle in a corner, unregarded, unneeded, unwanted.

He picked up bits and pieces of thought. Pieces and parts of the core of ideas and topics that made no sense to him. The belchers said this. The buzzers don’t know. The belchers made promises. They don’t keep promises. Better than the buzzers. Don’t be too sure of that. It’s pink. What’s pink? The thing. The entity we’re supposed to fetch. For them? No. No, not for them. For us. You’ll see. I do see. We see. And soon they’ll see.

They’ll see. The buzzers will see.

So we’ll get it.

Yes.

And we’ll change it.

Yes.

And we’ll give it back to them.

Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, they won’t like that.

No. They won’t.

And the Go-Between?

Irrelevant. Unless he gets in our way.

Then everything left, the voices left, and was-Lynn tumbled back into the sea of his private torment.

The nine beings removed their head pieces, returning them to hang off hooks on the side of the metal table. Eight figures stepped away from the table and from the transparent, sarcophagus-like case resting atop the table.

The leader of the Pain Rabble caressed the transparent lid of the sarcophagus, peering at the decimated, torn, flayed, and partially burned thing that was once Lynn Trammel.

“These people have so much to offer,” he said, standing away and regarding his peers with dark, somber, lidless eyes.

He stepped around the small group of beings, gesturing for them to follow.

“We will help them go through the Great Filter. We will help them. Survive. They will join us. They will join the Rabble.”
* * *
Friday

Even with the specially designed bio-suits built to withstand and mitigate the Velikovsky waves saturating the Pink Chamber, the de-Velikovsky suit or the dV-suit, a warm tingle flowed through Serena Craft, a broad, almost universal and physical love of all things female, feminine, woman. She eyed her assistants, all male, with a cold hostility. She suppressed the antagonism. After all, few women could make it very long in this chamber, even with the dV-suits, and the workers proved useful.

No women, with few exceptions, were permitted in this chamber without male accompaniment. Absolutely forbidden for two or more women to occupy the chamber at the same time. Indeed, protocol recommended at least 30 minutes of “decompression” before resuming even quotidian proximity with the female sex.

A protocol which most went unregarded, ignored.

It wasn’t uncommon for a female lab worker, after spending more than ten minutes in the Pink Chamber, to emerge from the second pair of steel doors down the hall only to find herself quickly stripped out of her dV-suit by at least one female assistant, in many instances already naked herself, to be fiercely and passionately kissed, fondled, fucked and laid. After all, the mutual orgasms were so good, so sweet, so hot, during that cooling down period, when the glow of the Living Pink still burned bright. Management never punished these lapses.

Nonetheless these activities which were officially frowned on. And recorded of course.

All four walls pulsated with the Living Pink. A thick sheet of unbreakable glass protected the chamber from the Living Pink, but a cooling system ran waist-high around the circumference of the room. At various intervals built-in arms with gloves allowed researchers to manipulate and test various areas of the glossy, wet, pulsating pink substance, ridged and corrugated like the cerebrum of the human brain, made flat and huge on the walls of the laboratory.

Here and there wires attached to nodes on the pink substance, taking measurements of various kinds, monitoring and reviewing all activity of the mysterious and powerful substance. The Living Pink. The core, foundation, the raison d’être of The Diana Group and the secret to all its power and wealth, the dream of which Nero Craft glimpsed so many years ago.

You could scrape pieces of it off, and it would grow back. You could put it on damaged skin, and the damaged skin would heal. You could take it internally, and damaged or irreparable organs would heal. Missing limbs, missing organs, could be grown back. The stuff itself grew, displayed every sign of life, except it wasn’t. Not any kind of terrestrial life, nothing that could even begin to meet expectations of what life was. It grew, multiplied, kind of. It did not reproduce. That much was almost certain. It had no cellular structure, no genetic material. Just almost completely exotic, utterly mysterious chemical compounds, molecular structures, crystalline structures, molecules, and compounds made of inexplicable and almost untestable elements.

Wet, fleshy elements and wet, fleshy molecules. Wet, fleshy compounds that produced strange wave patterns called Velikovsky waves. What the Velikovsky waves signified was anybody’s guess.

The stuff was absolutely miraculous. With one vital caveat.

Direct contact with the pure stuff, for a woman, resulted immediately in a prolonged and dangerous orgasm, and produced an intense and overwhelming attraction to the same sex, an attraction made permanent with even minor exposure. For a man direct contact with the substance had unforeseeable, unpredictable, very often subtle effects. For one thing, prolonged exposure often but not always resulted in a kind of sexual torpor or indifference. Internal exposure could lead to, well, quite unexpected developments, as Nero Craft himself found out. Sometimes, but not often, direct contact with the pink substance could cause death, at least for a man.

Certainly it produced, almost immediately, a marked deference to female humans, to all things female, really.

Nothing really slavish, you wouldn’t say that. Just a marked, very noticeable esteem. A willingness to acquiesce.

The Diana Group had learned decades ago to refine the product, to “kill” the product before mixing it with inactive ingredients and inhibitors. It must be kept in a vacuum at all times. And prior to any kind of chemical reaction, treatment, or testing, it must be frozen for several hours at sub-zero temperatures, far below sub-zero temperatures, close to 100 degrees Celsius.

Nero Craft himself perfected many of the procedures and reactions, had developed and even invented many of the first cosmetics made by the corporation, many of the first pharmaceuticals. He had acquired a certain notoriety in his ability to win large government contracts, contracts which paid off handsomely to both parties.

But his main preoccupation, what really set him apart, was his contributions to the cosmetics industry. The Living Pink, or derivatives of the Living Pink, went into the production of foundation, concealer, blush, highlights, skin cleanser, skin care creams and lotions, eyeshadows and more. The products almost literally flew off the shelves. Women loved Therapeutic Transformations, as expensive as it was.

For one thing, it took years off a woman’s face, returning her skin, her flesh to its natural, youthful glow. Whether it actually prolonged life remained to be seen, but one thing stood out clearly: Women who wore Therapeutic Transformations makeup looked as though they had been given a second youth.

And if the makeup also brought with it a noticeable change in sexual attitudes and proclivities, an open willingness to flirt with, or engage in physical intercourse with other women, a marked change in preference, well, that was always marked down to the woman herself and never the makeup the woman wore.

Competitors of course tried everything they could to analyze the chemical compounds in the makeup. Outright espionage was attempted, to little success.

The line of Pink Sunshine Spice Lipstick, developed by their subsidiary Therapeutic Transformations, absolutely sparkled with the stuff. It’s gloss, its deep pink, its lastingness, all that could be attributed to the Living Pink. As well as other, um, outcomes and consequences. A woman who wore Pink Sunshine Spice, even on initial applications, would find herself almost irresistibly attracted to other women. Eventually, sooner rather than later, it turned a woman into a lesbian, no matter how strong the previous orientation.

Still in the testing phase, Serena had tried to keep a close lock on the stuff, but that daughter of hers, well. No harm, no foul.

Probably should have used less of the Living Pink.

The government tried, with varying degrees of failure, to lift the veil of The Diana Group’s success, but the Living Pink remained secret.

There just seemed to be no desire for anyone who worked in the Pink Chamber to talk about the substance. No one mentioned their experiences, no one talked shop about the lab, no one really talked about all the loud sex in the halls outside the Pink Chamber. Shy smiles, sidelong glances, hands suddenly reaching out to caress the side of a breast, to clasp a hip, a brief kiss on the lips as acknowledgment of the time spent in the levels far below the surface, a whispered promise in the ear, these were the signs and revelations of a female researcher’s work in the Pink Chamber.

Behavior that was indistinguishable from that of most women working for The Diana Group to be quite honest.

But no overt word, and absolutely no speaking of it above the lowest level, where the Living Pink brooded in its chamber.

All the same access to the chamber was strictly limited. Approved researchers only, female scientists only, accompanied by male assistants. Only one researcher at a time. The number of researchers and assistants, kept to a bare minimum, stayed the same through the years, although from time to time the names changes, through death, resignation, or retirement. The Diana Group maintained a close watch on retirees and those who resigned their positions (very few of those), but so far the secret of the Living Pink remained close, intact, guarded, unspoken, unbetrayed.

Nothing less than a minor miracle, really, given the immense compensation given to any hypothetical traitor. But it just hadn’t happened.

Nonetheless, after Miss Baker’s unfortunate episode, security at the lowest level stiffened.

Lesbian orgies outside the second pair of steel doors were absolutely, categorically frowned on. Any such shenanigans would be met with the sternest looks from the highest echelons of management, girls.

Very stern looks.

Oh, god. Yes. There. Oh god there.

Serena was measuring the amplitude of the substance’s Velikovsky waves. The Velikovsky waves had been erratic lately, inexplicably rising and falling to no stimulation the researchers could detect. Serena, alarmed by anything for which she could offer no account, inspected the instruments herself, and was verifying the measurements when the alarms sounded.

The alarms blared throughout the lower levels. A perimeter had been breached, but no one could say where or by what. Confusion and chaos reigned. Serena hurried from the Pink Chamber, catching at her head piece to disconnect it from the rest of her suit and scrambling down the hall to pass the second pair of steel doors.

The doors swung open at her approach. Where all other staff must scan their right hand, every door and access point in The Diana Group Research and Development Center had been set to Serena Craft’s biosignature. No place existed in the facility, above ground or below, where Serena Craft’s presence wasn’t noted or authorized. The tiny speaker in her earpiece buzzed.

“Dr. Craft?”

“Yes, James.”

James Bellydog helmed the security section and had direct access to her personal network, along with Dr. Carla Essenza, Chief of Transformation Research and Joint Sciences Chief and a few others. A very few. Her personal assistant. Her daughter. A handful of others who knew better than to use it.

“There’s something outside the perimeter at ground level. We can’t tell what it is or how it got there, but it’s out there.”

“I expect more than that out of you, James.”

“I know, ma’am. It’s just that. I mean, it’s outside. It’s in the sewer.”

The alarms continued to scream as Serena turned into a checkpoint station monitoring entry and egress from the Pink Chamber. The checkpoint was located on the right side of the hall, exiting the second pair of steel doors. She nodded at the assistant in her pink scrubs and shorts, waiting for her. Phyllis approached, squeezing her thighs together, but Serena waved her off.

“Dr. Craft?”

“Yes, James.”

“I’ve seen it. We’ve seen it. It’s not, um, terrestrial.”

“Creepers?”

“I don’t think so. It’s pink, I can tell you that. We managed to shoot it with a tracking beacon before it slipped back into the smaller drains. It looks like it’s going deep, trying to find a way down.”

Serena’s mind raced, trying to recall something her father, her husband mentioned years ago.
* * *

The day after fetching the orb, Nero, not yet fatigued, not yet so strangely exhausted, a sudden impulse to visit Little Reno Arroyo Falls came over him. He saw no reason not to. So, borrowing his uncle’s keys, he drove the twenty or so miles west to the canyon, where he parked the pick-up in a small gravel parking lot and hiked towards the waterfall.

No locals visited the basin that day, no one Nero could see. Driven by an impulse, an urge he could not explain, the young man quickly stripped out of his clothes and plunged into the cool waters of the pool formed by the falling water. He swam towards the cascade, passing the water falling over his shoulders and back as he continued swimming into the small grotto behind the fall. He had swum in this basin since childhood, and he knew the grotto like the back of his hand. A small, cave-like chamber carved from centuries of falling water, the cave itself held nothing remarkable. A short narrow ledge near the back, where kids could come, look out at the world from behind the cascade, and make out.

But even that was rare.

Folks just didn’t like to go behind the waterfall, and most kids stayed out, venturing only to look around. Lovers quickly grew anxious in the grotto, rowdies hated the tranquility, and vandals stayed out.

Nero swam to the ledge, scrambling clumsily to catch a foothold to pull himself up. He caught his breath, dripping on the rock. He felt a breeze or draft of air blowing cold on the wet skin of his back and shoulders. Looking behind him, he saw the back of the grotto receding further than he remembered. A weird haze seemed to form in the darkness of the cavern, and the air around him vibrated with the mysterious thrill of the uncanny.

Nero stood up and walked deeper into the cavern.

The dark haze dissipated in the glow of a pink shimmer forming around a pillar, man-high, around six feet. Drawing closer, Nero was reminded of those Egyptian obelisks he’d read about in International Geographic, or the Osiris Monument to Freedom in Hancock, Federal City. This pillar was much smaller, of course, and entirely smooth on all sides, made of some pink crystal or pink marble. A glow emanated from the column, illuminating the grotto. Four-sided, the base formed a square maybe a foot on all sides, tapering to about nine inches at the top capped by a pyramid.

Nero reached out to touch the obelisk, and the world changed.

Immediately he found himself looking out upon an altered landscape. He stood on an open plain, the wind howled across the grassless steppes, and a crescent moon hovered in and out of torn, ragged clouds sailing fast in the night sky. A pink glow emerged high over the eastern horizon, closing in at incredible speed, until Nero discerned a billowing, massive cloud-like mist, a pink cloud overhead, like a massive storm cloud charged with lightning, glowing pink and foreboding. Suddenly a beam shot down, lightning quick but blade straight, round and narrow, no more than a few inches in diameter, landing soundlessly near his feet. The beam stayed like that for several seconds.

The beam vanished, and the cloud above broke into a sudden downpour of pink rain, and Nero beheld the obelisk at his side.

Suddenly the world changed again.

Nero saw a beautiful young woman, not much older than a girl really, dressed obscenely in some kind of prostitute’s clothes, a see-through dress that shamed Nero for even looking. Her golden blond hair bounced in a wave behind her as she ran down a dark corridor, chased by something Nero could not see. A terrible gash ran down her left arm.

The world changed again.

Nero stood in a strange room, a bedroom he did not recognize, looking at himself in a large mirror hanging on a wall.

He wore a short red kimono. He turned his side to the mirror, looking in mesmerized horror at his profile, his belly round and extended in obvious late-term pregnancy.

The world changed again, and he stood once again at the bottom of the canyon, near the dying body of Betty Blake, partially thrown from Nero’s Ford. He looked up to see the orb crashing down the side of the canyon, splitting as it landed, and flinging a pink globule into the river, washing away downstream.

He heard the voice of Betty Blake beside him.

“It’s in the wrong place. There’s a place. A waterfall. You have to take us. We are inside you.”

Then he saw the face of another beautiful woman, the peaceful face of someone he knew he loved deeply, and then he collapsed, and the world vanished, and found himself in the dark grotto, on his hands and knees beside the obelisk.
* * *

Serena thanked James Bellydog.

“Just get down here as quick as you can. And bring those cold blowers.”

The cold blowers sprayed particalized freezing agents several yards. They were developed by The Diana Group for some unknown reason. Quite possibly Serena had harbingered such a need for them as now without quite knowing why. Maintaining the Pink Champer at cold temperatures kept the Living Pink from getting too active, and Serena thought the same might hold true for the intruder. She suspected a connection. She felt certain of it.

“Something else came down that night, honey,” Nero had said to her. “Their vehicle broke, and something got out. I wonder what it was. And what became of it.”

They’d soon find out, Serena hunched.

Shortly after speaking to James, Serena heard the whine of the pale blue security carts, a nice pretty pastel blue, Serena thought, to offset and bring the abundance of pink into sharper relief. And those uniforms. So cute. So adorable, those men in their baggy, functional costumes. All those pockets. Simply darling.

Still feeling the effects of spending thirty minutes in the Pink Chamber, Serena called Bellydog.

“James?”

“Yes, Dr. Craft.”

“Give me five minutes in the checkpoint.”

“Understood, Dr. Craft.”

Serena beckoned the waiting assistant, her beloved Phyllis, standing a few feet away from the head of The Diana Group, openly rubbing her crotch through the leg of her tight, pink shorts.

“Better make it fifteen, James.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Serena turned to the assistant.

“Get me out of this thing, girl. And make me feel good. Oh god, you look so hot. I can’t take it.”

Phyllis squealed and flung herself at her boss.
* * *

Nero lay on the couch, staring at the rough hull of the probe in the middle of the room. The thin pink line circling the middle of the orb had lost its luster. Nero could now barely discern the crack in the dim light of the cabin, which had faded slowly over time. It had been a week since he and his uncle hauled the object to their house, and no movement or sign of activity came from within the confines of the orb. It had fallen completely silent, completely still.

If Betty still lived, no sign could be detected of her.

Nero’s dreams lately had been, well, the thing is, he couldn’t say, dreams that vanished upon the moment of waking, leaving his mind restless, alert, somehow tingly. His body moved sluggishly through the day, exhausted. He found himself spending whole days in his bed or on the couch, napping. He’d missed work three days in a row.

He called in sick, saying he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to come back.

“Don’t bother,” replied the garage owner.

His uncle had knocked on the door a couple of times, checking in.

“I’ll be all right, Uncle. I just feel. Weird. But I’m getting better.”

“But you lost your job.”

“I’ll get another. I’m a good mechanic.”

Days later he still remained in bed, too exhausted to stand up, but with a brain running full tilt, blazing with ideas, plans, a frenzy of projects and even calculations.

Now, staring at the orb, Nero had his first solid idea.

It just might work, but it would take time.

Meanwhile, he’d have to back to work, save up money, avoid any kind of entanglement.

It just might work.
* * *

Pastor Flair eyed the photo on his computer and looked grimly at the four deacons sitting around the small round conference table in his office. At least he hoped he did it grimly. Grim really didn’t suit Pastor Flair, but he did his best to pull it off.

“Well, I mean. I guess that’s that.”

The four deacons nodded in unison.

“I mean, probably a bad idea to have them come back. Might cause trouble with the flock.”

The four deacons repeated their collective nod.

“I mean, it’s not like they give much.”

The four deacons shook their heads in dismay.

“Might drive away those who do. We can’t have that.”

Three deacons partially shook their heads and partially nodded, unsure which movement the pastor’s statement required. The other deacon tapped the forehead above his right eye with his index finger.

“Now you’re thinking,” the gesture said. The deacon remained silent.

“I suppose I’ll have to call them. Explain the situation. Let them down gently. I mean,” he said, taking a look at the picture. “That poor girl.”

The four deacons frowned in that expression of sorrow mixed with outrage the righteous wear in the face of fallen virtue.

When the last deacon closed the door behind him, Pastor Flair unbuttoned his trousers, adjusted the monitor, and reached his hand towards his groin.

I mean, it’s not like she’s a member of the church anymore, he thought.
* * *

After it became obvious that the, um, lesbian episodes after each session in the Pink Chamber would not stop, Serena had allowed a fairly large and very comfortable bed to be placed in the checkpoint station. As she lay back on one end of the bed, watching Phyllis, the assistant, spreading her legs wide, Serena silently vindicated her own approval of the bed. It just made things feel right. Better. Women should make love with each other on a soft bed, not a cold, hard floor.

Serena devoured Phyllis with her eyes, the pretty assistant with short dark pixie cut hair, leaned on one elbow while positioning the end of a purple double-headed dildo into the wet, shining lips of her trimmed pussy. Phyllis had a thin, slender body, her clavicles were pronounced, her breasts were size of large oranges, and sweat beaded and dripped between the her mounds, down the flat, hard valley between her modest and lovely globes, much smaller than Serena’s, sexy little mounds with dark areoles and perky nipples jutting like, well, like nipples, like sexy little nipples, hard at the excitement, the pleasure, of sex with Serena, so hot, so sexy, lying back and spreading her legs for her underling, her assistant, her little Phyllis.

Serena rubbed her wet cunt, stroking her soaked cleft with two fingers, spreading her lips wide to show Phyllis.

“Hurry, baby. God, you make me so hot, but we’ve got to hurry.”

The alarms continued to blare. Ordinarily, Serena loved to be teased by Phyllis, loved to ache with need and desire just by watching the lovely girl remove her clothes, play with herself, her fingers slowly, teasingly, drifting over her bare, puffy lips, squeezing her tits one by one, and sucking the fluids of her cunt from her fingers while wriggling her ass at the sole owner of The Diana Group. But she worried about the intruder. Every minute counted, and here she was. Well. I mean. Who wouldn’t? She shoved her hips forward.

“I’m going to be so soft with you, baby. Later, when we get time. I’m going be so soft and gentle with you, I’ll kiss you all over that hot body of yours, and float butterfly kisses all over your sweet pussy, I’ll make you ache and beg for it, girl, tease you till you scream for release, I really will. But right now I just want you to fuck me. Just fuck me as hard as you can, okay baby? Okay?”

Serena bit her bottom lip watching Phyllis ease the purple tip of her end of the dildo into her pussy, utterly taken in by the sight of the young woman’s gorgeous lips expanding around the thick object. Phyllis scooted forward and touched the opening of Serena’s vagina with the other end.

“Your turn,” she said sweetly.

The alarms howled around them.

Serena gasped at her lover.

“When this is over,” she said. Then she thrust her pelvis at the two headed phallus. Serena had eyes only for Phyllis’s body. She loved looking at a woman during sex, she loved to watch their breasts tremble, the faces get flushed, how their soft hands moved from the thigh to bellow, from tit to mouth, she loved to stare at their pussies, their cunts, their holes, watching how they grew darker and wetter and more swollen and more desirable as the sex between them heated up, she loved to stare at their arms, their legs, the gentle feminine curves of their bodies. God, she loved women.

Working around the Living Pink, how could she not?

The alarms continued, but Serena was lost in a cloud of lust and longing.

The hips of Serena thrust forward against the dildo, urging the plastic toy into the waiting pussy of Phyllis, who timed her thrusts to Serena’s until both women were groaning and sweating on the bed, Serena’s fuller, larger voluptuous body shaking and trembling as it made heated love to the frailer, almost waif-like body of the younger woman, until the entire room was filled with the sounds of sirens and alarms, grunts, moans, and the pounding of the bed frame against the wall and floors.

Phyllis rolled her hips against the shared cock, urging the purple dildo deeper and deeper into her pussy, enchanted at the sight of her lover, her mistress, her owner, really, losing her hard composure, her hard and serious composure dissolving into that almost liquid pool of feminine wanton abandonment and lust, the face of a harried woman melting into the grace of a coming orgasm, her hard and solemn features melting into the soft glow of pleasure.

Phyllis lived for that.

Few others knew how soft Serena could be, how gentle, how teasing, how she cooed and coaxed her assistant with whispers, nibbles, soft lips, and floating kisses along every inch of her shivering body. Serena could be rough, Phyllis knew that much, could pound her as if the assistant were no more than a rag doll, and Phyllis loved that too, trembling with a fear mixed with adoration and lust. Phyllis seemed to be made for Serena, yielding to every need, command and whim. In the end, she found herself owned mind and body by Serena Craft and regretted this much only: that there was not more of her to sell, or to be given, or to be plundered.

Their cunts were so close to each other, the dildo so deeply inside both women, their lips, their mounds touched at each jerk forward, sending a spasm of electric pleasure through the two women. With one hand the women held themselves up, looking in crazed wonder at the other’s body, taking in the scent and sight of their fucking, and with the other they rubbed each other’s clits, urging the other to that needed, delirious orgasm.

Suddenly Serena tossed her head back and screamed.

Bellydog, waiting outside the checkpoint, heard Serena above the alarms.

He nodded curtly to his men.

Not much longer now.

A few minutes later, Serena emerged from the door, dressed in her office clothes, her hair a wet, tangled mess.

But she looked happy, almost bouncing on her heels with a satisfied swing of her ass.

Her eyes met James and held them steadily.

“You say it travels through the sewer?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Do you know where it is now?”

Bellydog held a big, squarish object in his hand, a lighted screen covering most of the front. A couple of buttons and knobs ran across the bottom of the pad-like object. Remembering the toy from their childhood, some of the older crew called it the Etchasketch, and the name stuck.

“It’s getting close. It’s almost at this level now.”

Serena climbed into the security car.

“Get in. I know where it’s going.” Serena looked toward the back of the cart. “Good. You brought the cold blowers.”

Bellydog’s head made a brief, affirmative gesture.
* * *

Sanders stood outside the side of his home, doubtfully eyeing the gray cube of the external fan of his air conditioning unit, which had been clanging loudly for several days. He’d be damned if he’d spend any more money on the damned thing. He could fix it. He could fix anything. If he could just figure out how to get that top off.

The pussycat mewling of Elizabeth Beebe on the verge of another orgasm peeped through the open upper story window of the Beebe house next door, for all the world sounding like a cross between a little kitten mewing and a songbird chirping to its nestlings.

“Yes, Matthew, there. Yes, there. Deeper, darling, deeper. Oh fuck me, Matthew, fuck my pussy.”

“Oh sir,” Sanders muttered to himself. “Give it a break, why don’t you?”

They’d been going at it like that for a week now. Ever since last Sunday. Sanders tried to keep his mind off the subject, a far from appetizing vision. What were they, like 90 or something? Did people still do that at 90?

Last weekend when he first heard them (he’d been checking the nails in his deck at the time), he’d thought, “why you sly dog, Matthew, you still have some in the tank.”

But after a week? Oh sir, they needed to stop. They could get hurt doing that.
* * *

The security car came to an abrupt stop at the women’s restroom on the Lowest Level. All the restrooms on the Lowest Level were located on the far side of the first pair of double steel doors barring entry to the Pink Chamber. That is to say, anyone working in the Pink Chamber would have to leave both sets of doors before being able to do one’s business. Serena had considered installing a restroom nearer the Pink Chamber but discarded the idea as impractical. No one should be working long enough in the chamber to need to take a break. Time in the chamber was limited to half an hour maximum under extreme circumstances, with no more than ten or fifteen minutes being the recommended usual exposure time.

Serena lurched forward, holding tight to the handle on the dashboard, then took a second to grind her pussy against the car seat. God. When this was over, that Phyllis wouldn’t know what hit her. She’d probably need to take the rest of the afternoon off. Serena squirmed her ass against the seat, fighting pack a powerful urge to slip a hand between her legs to rub a quick one out.

After all, she was the boss. Who’d say anything?

The Pink Chamber never affected her this much before.

A horniness raged through her system; every nerve screamed for the touch of a woman. But she couldn’t. Not yet. That thing was here. Would be here any moment.

Serena sat up and leapt off the cart.

She turned to Bellydog.

“Where is it now, James?”

“Four floors up.” James looked at the pink dot on the screen, a pink dot shown against a basic digital diagram of the facility’s lower levels. He watched the pink dot move back and forth on one level.

“It seems to be hesitating.”

“It’s going to go here,” Serena pointed at the door of the restroom. “It’s looking for a way down.”

If Bellydog had any doubts, he didn’t express them. Besides, he learned years ago that Serena had an uncanny ability to know things. No secret could be kept long hidden. Not from her.

Two security officers, sitting in the back seat, hopped out of the cart the moment it stopped. They stood at attention, waiting for orders from Bellydog.

“I want that thing captured alive, if at all possible, James,” Serena said as she entered the restroom, followed by the men, heavy cold blowers strapped to their backs like a diver’s oxygen tanks. A sturdy hose ran from the bottom of the tanks to the “gun” of the cold blowers, a long, pipelike rod with two handgrips. The security officers held their “gun” at attention, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

The Diana Group, of course, held several contracts with the Vespuccian government, and she remembered seeing sketch-ups of several military weapons that were considered but never used. One such weapon, horrific even in its contemplation, had troubled her mind terribly.

Flamethrowers, they were called.

Terror weapons capable of spewing fountains of flaming liquid dozens of yards against human targets.

The Vespuccian military rejected those proposals, of course. Even they wouldn’t contemplate such barbaric and needless cruelty.

The cold blowers reminded Serena of those horrible things, but she calmed herself by reminding herself that the cold blowers weren’t actually meant for destruction or harm. Hopefully, they would help “de-activate” whatever that pink entity was.

A research scientist, tall in high heels and thigh high pink lab coat, stood washing her hands at the sink. Her light brown hair hung in flowing waves past her shoulders, a full-bodied hair style parted in the middle, outlining a serious but friendly face. Serena recognized her as one of the older scientists working in the labs of the Lowest Level, labs devoted to mixing, refining, and deriving new products from the Living Pink. A striking woman in her late 40s. A lovely, intelligent woman named Tessa, Dr. Tessa Thrace.

Wide, full hips, fleshy legs covered in dark hose.

As usual with Lowest Level research scientists, her face was flushed red, her pupils dilated, and her hips shifted weight from one foot to the other. She smiled shyly at Serena, but Serena, in the full intoxication of lust, accepted none of that. She strode straight up to Tessa, a few years older than Serena herself, seized the woman’s left hand and forced it between her lasciviously spread thighs. Serena’s skirt rode high, showing the half-moons of her magnificent ass.

Serena lifted her right hand to half hold, half choke the scientist, clutching her just under her chin and squeezing the woman’s neck. She planted a loud wet kiss on Tessa’s trembling mouth, urging her tongue into the parted lips. When she felt the other woman moving her hand inside her panties on her volition, she released her arm and moved her hand between the scientist’s thighs, moving up to slide her fingers between the thin, satin string of the woman’s thong. She felt moist, warm, welcoming, turning Serena’s hot fire into a ferocious blaze.

She stopped kissing, pulling her mouth away from the mouth of Tessa. She nuzzled her nose against the woman’s flushed cheeks and licked with just the tip of her tongue to Tessa’s ear.

“That’s it, baby, fuck me,” she whispered. “Fuck me with your dirty hand, fuck my filthy pussy with your dirty fingers. But you’ve got to hurry. You’ve got to make me cum. Like I’m going to make you cum. Oh god, I’m going to make you cum so hard. Stick your tongue out.”

The scientist obediently stuck out her tongue.

“Good girl,” Serena praised, sucking on the woman’s extended tongue while thrusting and rolling her hips against the woman’s hand, who now had three fingers inside Serena’s hot and dripping hole.

She knew she shouldn’t be doing this, not now, not with her men there, oh god, she didn’t care about them, but what about that thing? She had to think.

But she couldn’t think. New heat raged through her brain, new lust, new desires, her body burned with desire. She needed this. She needed this so bad.

Releasing the woman’s neck, Serena tore the woman’s blouse with a swift, hard yank. The woman’s breasts, braless, poured out, wobbling at their sudden, almost brutal exposure. Serena groaned at the sight of Tessa’s large breasts, melon-sized globes. Her hand moved over each one, restlessly exploring the soft skinscape. She pinched her nipples mercilessly to hardness.

“Oh god, I can’t,” Serena moaned. “I can’t resist you.”

Covering Tessa’s nipple with her mouth, she sucked and nibbled, licked and sucked the soft and shaking gland. Wet, plopping sounds filled the restroom, Tessa’s aroused groans rising to meet them.

Serena felt Tessa’s soaked pussy beginning to spasm around her fingers. Serena continued to fuck the hot, wet vagina, caressing the folds of her labia with her pinky and index fingers while plunging her middle and ring fingers repeatedly into the hot canal. Tessa jerked and convulsed, shuddering against Serena’s hands. She wrapped her right arm around Serena’s shoulder and collapsed into her.

Tessa bit Serena’s neck.

She pulled away in the glow of her climax and beamed at her boss.

“God, Serena,” she said. “That was amazing.”

Suddenly Serena felt someone move behind her, lift her skirt even higher. Somebody grabbed her by the hips to pull her ass out. She felt strong, hard masculine fingers paw at her thin panties, pulling them aside. A hard cock poked into the crack of her ass even as Tessa kept fucking her with her fingers, a fourth finger having joined the three. She wanted to struggle, Serena wanted to shake her head no, to demand a stop, to order a stop to this, but something held her back. She urged her ass against the man’s cock and looked behind her.

Bellydog, a strange unfamiliar look on his face, set and resolved, but not angry, hostile, or even belligerent. A weird, almost feminine expression she had seen on Sara’s face, or Carla’s, or even Phyllis when she wanted to touch her boss.

This is so wrong, Serena thought to herself, but her outrage dissipated the moment it flared up. Serena, a topnotch scientist, pricked her remaining intellect. Velikovsky waves don’t affect men, she thought. Certainly not like this.

But it was wrong. Everything in her screamed that it was wrong. Men shouldn’t touch women. Men should definitely not have sex with women. Her whole being knew this. Everything in her shouted this truth at her, but she pushed her ass further at James Bellydog.

The tip of his cock was at her rosebud, threatening to slip past her suddenly greedy ring. Serena, skilled at anal sex, knew how to respond. Her lovers frequently spent whole nights swinging their strapped-on cocks into her ravaged asshole. She knew to loosen her sphincter, and god help her, she did.

She heard Bellydog’s masculine groan as her security chief plunged the full length of his cock into Serena’s burning asshole.

It was right, she thought. Sometimes they needed this. Sometimes the men needed a little something. Those darling little troublemakers, those adorable little shits.

Her ass quivered around Bellydog’s shaft as Serena rolled her hips into Tessa’s hand, moving away from the man’s cock only to plunge her cunt deeper onto her employee’s fingers. Her vagina opened, and Tessa moved her thumb inside her.

Oh god, she’s fisting me. She’s fisting me while James fucks my ass from behind.

She closed her eyes to the pleasure. She heard the thud, then another thud, of something or somethings metallic hitting the restroom floor, but she kept her eyes closed. She heard Tessa give out an exclamation of surprise. She felt Tessa move away from her, her hand still trying to fuck Serena’s pussy. Serena opened her eyes to see one of the security officers, naked from the waist down, a proud erection bursting from his groin, pull Tessa down by the head, moving the scientist’s face to his cock.

“I need this,” the man said. “Oh god I need your mouth around my cock.”

Tessa hesitated no more than her employer did. Casting a nervous glance at Serena, who just nodded and bit her lip, she took the proffered organ into her mouth, moving her lips expertly around his shaft, a practiced veteran of sucking dildos.

The third security officer made his way behind Tessa, his adorable blue uniform trousers past his naughty knees, (Serena giggled at the schoolboy look of the young man), his cock haughtily extended. He took hold of the scientist’s hips and with one powerful shove, stuck the length of his cock into the woman’s steaming cunt.

“I need this so bad,” he kept saying over and over. “I need to fuck you so bad, doc.”

Perhaps a little too informal, the young man really should have referred to Tessa as Dr. Thrace, but Serena understood the sentiment. He needed to, she agreed. He really needed to fuck her so bad. And Serena needed to watch. God, she needed to watch. She felt an orgasm coming on just at the sight of Tessa on her hands and knees, sucking off a security while get just hammered by another security officer behind. Sucking on a real dick. A real cock that would spray gorgeous white cum all over Tessa’s dirty, middle-aged slut face.

That picture of her daughter’s friend came into her mind.

Yeah, something like that.

That would be wonderful to see.

Bellydog kept shoving his cock in and out of Serena’s asshole. She moved a hand back to rub herself, to rub her clit and fuck her pussy with her own fingers while her security chief, that darling little boy, that sweetie, just pummeled her ass over and over again. She loved it.

Obviously she loved it.

The alarms still blared. The sirens still whined.

“What’s going on here?” she thought. “Shouldn’t we be?”

Suddenly the cock in Tessa mouth jerked back and spewed a continual spray, a volley of cum across the ecstatic face of Dr. Thrace. The third security officer shoved his cock one final time, almost screaming as he came inside the research scientist’s soaked and torrid cunt.

Then James rammed his shaft deep into Serena’s asshole, holding her hips roughly and harshly against his groin. Serena pressed her clitoris, hooking her two fingers over the ridge of her pussy until she was cumming, cumming, cumming in a long, quiet, whimpering, almost agonized release.

Moments later, moments that seemed like hours to Serena Craft, the high pitch scream of the alarms finally gained Serena’s full attention.

“Can’t we shut those damned things off?”

Almost immediately the alarms shut off. Silence rushed in to fill the void left by the absent sirens.

She pulled away from James, who by now had withdrawn his cock from his employer’s ass.

She turned around to gaze lovingly at the flaccid organ.

She held it gently in her hands and bent to kiss the tip.

“Good boy,” she said, “but we really need to get ready for that thing.”

The security officers gathered their uniforms sheepishly. Dr. Thrace stood up, brushed her knees, ran her hands over her torn pantyhose, and looked up at Serena Craft, who swept towards the lovely scientist, held Tessa’s cum-covered face between both her hands, and kissed her deeply, affectionately on the mouth, her lips smearing the security officer’s cum onto her own mouth.

She pulled her head away from the older scientist’s face.

She swept her tongue around her lips, licking at and swallowing the trickle of cum that had smeared on her mouth.

“You need to leave, baby. You just need to get out of here. Or I won’t be able to keep my hands off you. Please. Just go.”

Tessa wrapped her lab coat around her torn blouse and, taking her boss’s cues, fled the restroom as best she could on her high heels.

“The sacrifices we make for science,” she thought.

That mood of crazed horniness had passed, but Serena feared its imminent return. They didn’t have much time. Somehow she knew that.

“Where is it now, James?”

“One floor up and getting closer, getting closer fast.”

Bellydog touched a button, and the screen switched to show a graph.

“The V-waves are through the roof. I’ve never seen them get so high before.”

He showed the graph to Serena.

“They’re down now, though. That should give some time. If we’re lucky.”

She beamed at Bellydog and pinched his elbow.

“But that doesn’t explain what the hell happened to you, you dirty little boy. That was just marvelous, it really was, but I don’t, well, I don’t. Not usually. Not since. But it felt so right just now.”

Bellydog grinned.

“But don’t take any more liberties, buster.”

She looked at the two security officers tightening their black leather belts around their hips and helping each other strap the cold blowers to their backs.

“Same goes for your men.”

Too cute. Really they’re just too cute in those things.

Serena lifted the Etchasketch from Bellydog’s hands. She punched a few more keys and a new screen popped up.

“There’s something else here,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but this thing is picking it up. Strong. I don’t think it’s a wave. The Etchasketch would be able to graph a wave. Could be chemical. This thing has limited chemical analysis function.”

Suddenly the two security officers readied their weapons, pointing the ends of their cold blowers at the drain in the floor near the last stall.

They all heard it. A gurgling, sucking, slurping kind of sound. Something wet was working its way through the drain.

Bellydog stooped to peer through the grate. For a moment he saw nothing, the pipe below bent in a U-joint about two feet below the floor. He could hear it coming closer, but he could not see how closer. Then the pink blob surged forward, squeezing its bulk through the narrow drains. Bellydog couldn’t make out any features in the cramped space. But the pink, shining blob pressed against the grate, bolted into the floor by strong bolts.

Bellydog leaped back, and the two security, weapons ready, stepped forward.

“Careful,” Serena said. “Don’t shoot yet. We want to capture it, remember. Maybe we should unbolt the grate. James, have your men back away a little. I don’t want them to get trigger happy, and I want that thing caught whole.”

Serena never gave orders to an underling in the presence of their immediate supervisor.

Bellydog gave the order, and the men retreated several feet.

“It might give up, though, if it can’t get through that grate,” Bellydog said.

“We need to unbolt the grate then,” Serena agreed. She shivered as she felt Bellydog’s semen trickle from her asshole to run in a slow, sticky drip down her thigh.

At that moment, the pink blob squeezed through the grate, like jelly through a cheese grater.

Serena Craft and James Bellydog stared in mute fascination as the creature poured through the holes in the grate, separating through the grid only to remerge once getting through.

“Obviously a grate couldn’t hold it,” Serena thought.

When more than half the blob passed the grate, a towering, amorphic pink blob nearly two meters high, the two security officers grew alarmed. Raising their weapons to their shoulders they both aimed directly at the creature.

“Easy, boys,” Bellydog cautioned. “Let it get through first all the way.”

He pointed at one of the men.

“You there go around the thing and stand on the other side. We need to make sure it doesn’t try escaping the way it came.”

The security officer hardly swept around the tall blob, the creature lunged upward from the grate, using its lower body to form little pads for support.

Serena gasped.

The creature, now fully and completely inside the restroom, began to change shape. What was formless became a tall, vaguely squid-like being. Its body, wet and glistening, separated into many tentacles, and what Serena took to be the head, ballooned to a bulbous organ which tapered to a cone, with many gill-like orifices ringing the bottom of the head, a few inches above where the head met the tentacles. A myriad tentacles, dozens of tendrils, began to spread throughout the restroom, winding like serpents across the floor, over the stall doors, stretching towards the ceiling.

The entity seemed to hover, using only a few tentacles to keep the bulbous head afloat. The air crackled and trilled with an unseen energy, a pink aura emanated from the creature, suffusing the restroom in a shimmering, transparent rosé. My god, it’s beautiful, Serena realized. Her body warmed to the being, she recognized a connection between the two of them, indeed a kinship almost of blood and gene.

Bellydog had of course stood in the proximity of a landed TR-3B, and he had experienced that uncanniness, that weird shock of the mind’s encounter with the inexplicable caused by the Magnetic Field Disrupter, but what he felt now, in the presence of this pink entity, surpassed that experience as an ocean wave surpasses the ripple caused by a stone falling into a calm pond.

Quickly regaining his composure, Bellydog noticed two things. One, the creature had changed and grown rapidly, almost instantaneously. Two, his cock stood at full mast, harder than it had ever been in his life, even as an adolescent, pressing painfully against the barrier of this uniform trousers.

Alarmed at these developments, he ordered his men to fire.

“Now, dammit, get that thing,” is what he said.

The two men fired.

A dual blast of semi-crystalized nitrogenic slush burst from the cold blowers on either side of the entity, covering the main body in a white, pearly frost. For a moment, it looked as though the substance would freeze the creature. Both security officers continued to pour blast after blast of the white slush over the head and body of the creature, which contracted, spun, vibrated wildly, and shuddered. Then a tentacle flung forward, and another tentacle flung backward, each tendril wrapping around the neck of either security officer.

The officers dropped their weapons as both were lifted off the tiled floor, the entity shook off the frost for all the world like a hound shaking off bath water, and the two men, now in mid-air, flew to the creature head-first. An orifice on each side of the body opened wide, and the two tentacles plunged each man’s head into the gaping hole. The two men spasmed and went still.

Then the creature opened its “mouths” and dropped the bodies to the floor.

Bellydog, standing several feet away, peered into one of the cavernous holes.

“My god,” he said, unintentionally echoing those famous words of the famed Vespuccian astronaut. “It’s full of stars.”

Serena yanked his arm.

“James!” she shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now!”

Serena pulled her security officer away from the pink creature, now moving slowly towards the both of them. She made it the door, opened it, still holding on to Bellydog’s hand. Just as she stepped into the hallway, she felt Bellydog being torn from her grasp. Looking back in horror, she saw her chief of security lifted and pulled to one of the many waiting orifices of the strange being. She turned, slipped off her heels, and fled before witnessing Bellydog’s probable and inevitable demise inside the pink entity.

Reason returned to Serena, and she regained her courage after running several yards away from the restroom. She carefully replaced the heels she had taken off and tried smoothing out her rumpled blouse and skirt. Not much she could do about Bellydog’s semen still oozing from her ass, but appearances must be kept. The corridor she stood on now, a narrow corridor no more than a hundred feet in length, ran straight towards the main hallway, on the other end of which stood the first pair of double steel doors leading to the Pink Chamber.

Somehow she knew that the Living Pink must be protected at all costs. From that entity, from that Pink Entity.

And at the precise moment she realized she had no idea how to do so.
* * *

Why’d he have to do it, Wade complained bitterly to himself. I mean. Cripes. It stinks down here. DP stood behind him, holding the Handheld Device.

“It’s been here,” they said.

Wade shook his head, still trying to get use to the alternating dual sentences.

“But it’s not now. We think it went that way.”

Wade followed D’s hand, and P nodded at him.

I mean, it wasn’t even his best movie. Not even close.

But he still followed them to the edge of the city’s corporate park, where for reasons still suspiciously vague to Wade from Cleveland, it had been agreed upon to descend into the sewage system, tramping through the filthy waste in tall black rubber boots.

Buddy shouldered his way to the front, stooping in the cramped space just behind Wade.

D had pointed towards the left of three passages, which sloped in a descent deeper under the surface of the earth, while the middle passage went along fairly straight. The right passage led to a dead end, as far as Wade could tell, where a metal ladder climbed to the street level several feet above them. The light of day filtered through the holes in the manhole cover, gracing the dirty ladder in the yellow glow of the sun.

“How long since it came this way, do you think?” Buddy asked over his shoulder to the paired Roadmen.

“Not more than,” the passenger started.

“an hour,” the driver finished.

“So we’re pretty close, then.”

“Yes,” said D.

“But we’re picking up,” continued P.

“Something else,” DP finished in unison.
* * *

Somehow she had to lead the creature away from the Pink Chamber, Serena decided. She recalled that strange feeling of kinship with the creature, the sense that the two were somehow connected, intimately connected, related even in a mysterious way. Then she knew. Yes she knew. It all came back to her now, the words of Nero Craft. What happened at the canyon, what happened to Betty Blake. The change in Nero’s body, how he had become both mother and father. His pregnancy. Her conception. Her birth.

All that and more because of the pink that had gone into him, the Living Pink that swallowed Betty Blake and regurgitated her, almost a year after her disappearance, in Nero Craft’s first lab, a modest laboratory in an old warehouse on the outskirts of Edge City. Of course that girl had disappeared. Of course that girl was no longer Betty Blake, nor anything close to human. Just a part of the general blob and ooze that churned pink and bubbling in the midst of its interstellar carapace, once again in halves.

It no longer tried to communicate with Nero, but Nero had changed, nonetheless. The Pink had changed him. Altered him. Gave him an intelligence beyond any of his peers, an intelligence rivalling the great minds of the human species. Kurzweil. Streep. Stanton T. Friedman. He became adept at chemistry, finance, the gauging the probability of outcomes, physics, every manner of mechanics. His body, too, had been altered. No longer clearly a man, he became something of a woman. His body had formed a uterus, a vagina, a vulva, while retaining his, um, manhood.

It was only a matter of time before he managed to impregnate himself.

The pregnancy was long and tiresome, the birth painful and protracted. He vowed to remain celibate, to swear off all men, including himself, after the birth of his daughter, whom he named Serena, hoping she would bring him peace. And in her way, she supposed she did.

Nero became an avid advocate of birth control after that, going so far as to give himself a vasectomy. Literally himself. He trusted his secret to no one, going so far as to hide his pregnancy under baggy clothes. When it became too obvious, he blamed beer, fatty foods, and carbohydrates.

“I’ll go on a diet soon,” he promised his uncle.

Did she, Serena, inherit any of the Pink? Was she part of the Pink? Could that explain her ability to withstand prolonged periods of exposure? She had even touched the stuff once, and though it led to an entire day of the most intense orgasms she had ever experienced, she rose the next day as proverbially fit as the proverbial fiddle.

Could she communicate with it? Was it aware of her? So much had happened so quickly in the restroom. She didn’t really have a chance to explore those sensations of kinship with the strange creature. Bellydog had ordered his men to fire too soon, too quickly, before she could fully apprise the situation. And now all three men were. Well, she supposed they were dead. She didn’t really quite know. But now that she thought about it, it didn’t seem right.

Nothing about that creature, that being, that entity, seemed hostile, aggressive, or threatening. It certainly didn’t feel harmful or malignant. She wished Sara were with her. Sara would know. Sara would understand it. Feel it. Measure its mood, its emotion, its thoughts, if it had any.

Though her daughter had tried to keep it secret from her, Serena knew. She just did. She knew Sara could be a powerful empath. Had in fact already demonstrated powerful empathic abilities with her own mother. And certainly with all her friends. But that wasn’t all. Her daughter could alter people, coax them along. She’d even caught Sara doing that to her, several times in fact. Of course, she put a quick end to that sort of thing. Obviously.

Poor James.

Suddenly she heard a loud crash behind her. Spinning around she saw the door to the restroom splinter and crack, the walls surrounding the door frame break into pieces and collapse as a pink mass bulged through the breach.

Serena stood firm, facing the Pink Entity as it emerged fully from the rubble of the restroom. She couldn’t let it pass. She could not, no matter the cost to herself, allow the creature to gain access to the Living Pink. She felt sure of that. She knew beyond the shadow of the merest doubt that the livelihood of her daughter, the fortune and prosperity of her daughter and her daughter’s eventual family, depended precisely and exactly on the maintenance and possession of the Living Pink.

Could she communicate with it?

Though not as gifted as her daughter, she did have something. She knew how to measure a man’s heart and a woman’s mind.

Now fully in the corridor, the Pink Entity thrilled and hummed, its tendrils waving along the floor, the ceiling, the walls, a plenitude of serpents attached to the floating hydra head of the non-terrestrial being, still glowing, still charged with that glistening, glimmering pink power.

Serena stood her ground.

The Pink Entity drew closer.

Stopping within a few feet of the woman, scientist and Chief Executive Officer of The Diana Group, daughter of Nero Craft and mother of Sara Craft, the entity hovered, sending a few tentacles in her direction. Serena suddenly noticed the oval shaped bumps and protrusions covering the surface of the wet, shiny tentacles. The bumps opened, revealing smooth slits surrounded by puffy, wet flesh.

The tentacles hovered and floated around her body, gliding around her form, hovering and waving around her head. Serena Craft closed her eyes and tried desperately to listen.

One of the pink tentacles brushed against the left side of her head, just below her ear, Serena leaned against it, raising her arms to gently cradle the organ in her arms, pressing the side of her head lovingly against the warm, almost hot flexile limb, wet with a strange, intoxicating lubrication sending warm vibrations trilling throughout the body of Serena Craft.

Bellydog’s remaining semen flowed from her ass in a sudden deluge as Serena sank to her knees, crying out softly in yet another orgasm.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

Her pussy spasmed and convulsed, her hips jerked and thrust forward trying to fuck the air around her. A tentacle wrapped around her hips and brought her up as another tendril moved between her thighs, sliding towards her hot, greedy, and welcoming groin. The tip of the tendril slipped behind and passed the thin and flimsy gusset of her panties, and penetrated her vagina, filling her incredibly, fully, massively, a soft and unending phallus sending electric waves of pleasure and lust through every cell and nerve of her human body, of her woman’s body.

No, not a phallus. Somehow, impossibly vaginal. As if an endless, trembling, hot, wet chain of vaginas invaded her pussy, all open, all swollen, engorged fold against engorged fold, labia extended to caress the inside of her womanhood.

She opened her mouth to another tentacle as the Pink Entity slipped the wet tip, warm, provocative, stimulating into her mouth. Serena urged her tongue against it, groaning in another sudden orgasm, as the smell, taste, and texture of pussy filled the insides of her mouth. And still the tentacle entered her, penetrating to the back of her mouth, and down her throat.

Panicking, Serena struggled momentarily. Then she relaxed. The fear of choking, of suffocation passed, replaced by an overpowering sensation of, well, something more elevated than peace. Somehow she knew she could breathe. Rather, she knew that somehow she did not have to breathe. A kind of sustained orgasmic joy, as if all the orgasms she had had in her life were now joined, forming a high plain of female erotic arousal.

She began to hear words or thoughts that might have formed words given enough time and quiet and space.

Serena Craft whined at the surge of another wave of pleasure, rising to a new height and not diminishing.

She braced for another impact.

Suddenly a shot of pain seared through her, a cold, brutal pain. The Pink Entity quivered, a tremor of horror and loathing coursed through its body. It immediately withdrew its tentacles from Serena, who dropped weak, almost extinguished, to the floor.

Looking up, she saw nine beings gathering behind the Pink Entity.

Creepers. The Creepers had breached The Diana Group.

Unable to raise herself, exhausted by the power of the orgasms which raged through her just moments ago, she watched helplessly as the Creepers cast some kind of net around the Pink Entity, a dark net charged with a dark energy, a dark garnet color, almost black, sizzling and flickering around the weave of the net. The entity’s tentacles waved in vain as the net somehow retracted the tendrils towards the body, which shrank and diminished into itself, losing its flexile nature, its plasticity, its ability to separate and merge. It became a lump. A dry, pale lump of some pink substance, hardly worth noting.

The Creepers gathered around the leader, who pointed a device at the wall. Moby, had he been there, would have thought the device looked rather like a large nail gun. Serena, who never used a tool in her life, didn’t know what to make of it. The nail gun cast a wide beam of dark red light, and an opening formed in the wall of the corridor, an opening into which the leader of the Creepers stepped, followed one by one by the eight other Creepers, the last one dragging the lifeless body of the Pink Entity behind him, stock-still and lump-like in its net.

The opening in the wall vanished.

Serena collapsed against the floor as more security personnel ran to the rescue of their employer.
* * *

The Roadmen waded through the stench and muck of the sewage system, descending into the unknown depths of the corporate park.

Something bothered Wade.

“Shouldn’t sewage pipes flow down from the center? This one seems to be going down towards the center of the park. I don’t see how that makes sense. Seems like there’d be blockage.”

“Maybe they got some kind of pump,” Buddy offered.

“Maybe.”

They followed the slow winding slope of the concrete pipe, which widened as it descended.

“It’d be a pretty big pump, though.”

About a half an hour later DP, who had been leading the way now Handheld device in front of them, pausing now and then to confer in that strange way of theirs with forehead touching forehead, hearing a beep from the Handheld Device, stopped walking and turned around, both faces sharing a worried look.

“It’s gone,” they said simply. “It was here, and now it’s not.”

“What do you mean gone?” Buddy exclaimed in disbelief. “How?”

“What do you mean here?” Wade added, confused. “How did we miss it?”

“Well, not here exactly, but in the vicinity, where the device could pick it up. Very close. But now it’s gone. Not just far away either but gone. As in not here. Not there either. Not anywhere.”

“Well what happened to it?”

DP shook their heads.

“We just don’t know.”

“Well if that don’t take the pigeon,” Wade burst out angrily. “Now what?”

“I suppose we go back and get cleaned up,” Buddy answered. “Then we’ll talk to Frank and Rascal. Maybe they’ve done better than we did.”
* * *
Saturday

Earlier that day, Steve walked out of Wendy’s bedroom, absolutely stunned by two things. One, he was still alive. The police were not on the way, and no knife was sticking from his back. Two. Mary, my god, what on earth happened to her? Yes, he’d seen her, even with his head turned down and away. He’d seen that nose ring, that haircut, those clothes from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t say anything of course, not after having been discovered pumping his seed in her daughter’s pussy, Wendy’s pussy, Wendy’s hot, wet, lovely creampie of a pussy. My god.

He’d been fucking Wendy.

Wendy.

And her pussy was so good.

God. Everything about her just screamed sex.

And her own mother knew about it.

He hoped she didn’t blow a gasket.

Maybe they were talking about it right now, maybe Mary was daring Wendy to give one good reason, just one good reason why she shouldn’t call the cops.

But he didn’t hear any screaming.

No yelling.

He should’ve stayed outside Wendy’s bedroom, listening in, eavesdropping, but no, he’d gone downstairs to fester.

Maybe he should go back up, just to see what’s going on?

The phone rang.

Steve answered it.

He listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

“Well, she’s busy right now. But I’ll tell her. I’ll let her know not to go. No church on Sunday. Got it. Shouldn’t be a problem. Thanks.”

Steve hung up.

Five minutes later he forgot all about it. He walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of orange juice, loosened the cap, and held the bottle carelessly in his hand as he turned to face Mary Love.

Mary stood before him in all her lesbian glory, all her ear-pierced, nose-pierced, navel-pierced, platinum blond pompadour, leather mini-skirt, fishnet hose dyke glory, explaining how she was now a lesbian, just a total dyke now, that Wendy had talked to her, honestly and openly about what had happened between her and Steve the past few days, and that while she couldn’t really approve the relationship, as long as it was something Wendy wanted, as long as Wendy never felt pressured, they were free to have as much sex as they wanted.

Provided Wendy didn’t get pregnant.

Steve choked on air. The cold bottle of orange juice, wet with condensation, slipped from his loose hand, spilling juice all over the floor.

At the moment, Wendy entered the kitchen, dressed in a short t-shirt and pink sheer panties, Steve’s come tricking down her thighs.

“Oh, baby,” she said, getting him paper towels. “You’re such a klutz.”
* * *

With her long, full, red auburn hair, round cheeks set high on her face, her long nose running in straight slope to the round knob of nostrils, her wide mouth boasting a pair of full, luscious lips, below which her soft chin rounded out her beautiful face to a gentle point, Serena Craft strongly resembled her daughter. With this difference: where the daughter cast a jovial, almost carefree mien at the world around her, the mother continuously wore an expression of intense concentration, a serious and solemn demeanor, even in the most casual matter.

Few of her underlings knew that to be, well, not quite false but not the whole of the matter either. Serena certainly suffered fools with impatience, tolerated incompetence even less, and demanded the utmost diligence from her workers’ abilities, but she knew how to treat her employees with guarded respect as the case merited.

She could be serious. Thoughtful. Moments where a great care seemed to settle on her whole being, her face withdrew into itself, and her face glowed a little less. Phyllis, her assistant, yearned to take her in her arms to kiss and caress away the worry, and sometimes she did, but Serena at such times was slow to respond, slow to yield to her assistant’s insistent ministrations.

Serena dressed powerfully, elegantly, if a little demurely, modestly. A mid-length skirt, pantyhose or stockings (usually by Archie Beall, she just loved that company), a short blazer, blouse buttoned past her cleavage, dangling hoops in her ears. Sara had recently suggested she wear a black, lacy choker around her neck, a soft, satin choker. Trying it out, Serena had to agree. She looked sharp. Commanding.

Sara had agreed.

Serena Craft shifted her hips forward on her chair and parted her thighs even wider. Dr. Essenza highly recommended Cynthia, and Serena understood immediately why. The girl was good. Dr. Essenza had done a wonderful job with her, Serena admitted as she looked down at the pretty girl in makeup and short platinum hair licking her juicy cunt. Dr. Craft pulled the gusset of her red panties further to the side, allowing the girl as much access to her pussy as the girl needed in order to get the job done.

“God, Carla,” Serena asked, “how do you make them so happy to do this?”

“Oh Cyndi you mean,” the woman standing in front of the desk replied. Dr. Essenza, a large, full-figured woman of Middle Sea descent, with a large, oval face, a long, gently hooked Aquiline nose, and large, full red lips, made redder by the heavy use of lipstick, flashed a quick and knowing smile at her boss. “She’s a natural. She broke so easily I’m not even sure she did break. And her personality! My god, did you ever meet such a darling before?”

Serena couldn’t argue with that, she was too busy coming.

Phyllis, sitting in a chair in the corner of the office, legs spread and masturbating, her uniform’s pink gym shorts rumpled around her left ankle, eyed the girl under the desk suspiciously, brows furling at hearing such praise coming from her mistress. Oh, she knew she couldn’t possibly be the only one for Dr. Craft, no one girl could do that, but that fact didn’t mean she had to like it. Or like seeing it. Then again, she definitely liked seeing it. God it was so hot watching her mistress get eaten. Phyllis closed her pretty eyes and shoved a second finger into her hot wet snatch.

Serena, suddenly feeling her orgasm’s onslaught, grabbed the girl Cyndi by the back of her head, smashed her face against her wet groin, and squeezed her face with her powerful thighs, clamping the girl’s platinum head in a flow of orgasmic feminine juices.

“Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god. Fuck me girl, fuck me with your tongue.”

Serena started cumming, and Phyllis, unable to bear it any longer, needing pussy desperately, fell to the floor and crawled to Dr. Essenza standing in front of the desk.

“Please, Dr. Essenza, I need to taste you so bad. I’ll do anything.”

Phyllis began pawing at Dr. Essenza’s beautiful thighs.

Dr. Essenza stumbled to the empty chair in the corner, pulled her skirt up past her waist, fell into the chair, and spread her thighs.

“Good girl,” she said, petting the cute brunette’s pixie head and pulling it to her waiting groin, the scent of her heat and excitement rising.

Ten minutes later, Serena stared at her computer screen, still basking in the glow of her orgasm, going over the numbers, results, and progress of various projects, studies, and trials, and experiments her company, The Diana Group, performed. But her mind was on yesterday, and the missed opportunity of catching the Pink Entity. And deep consternation at the ability of the Creepers to breach their perimeters.

She would have to deal with that.

She would have to deal with them.

Of course she had to admit that without the Creeper’s interpolation, she would have lost the Living Pink. She felt certain of that. She just knew it, obviously.

And of course poor James and his men.

The good news was that all three survived.

The better news (or worse, depending on your point of view, she supposed) was that all three had to be kept on the same floor as the mindless lesbians, under strict observation, with absolutely no female caretakers. Men only. It was a curious situation, to say the least. Even at this early stage, Serena could see what happening. They were changing.

Like and unlike her father.

A day later, and the caretakers had reported that their, um, members had fallen off. They just wilted and fell off like the antlers of a buck.

Serena wondered but didn’t need to. She could guess.

Contact with the Pink Entity seemed to have increased that peculiar intuition she’d always had.

They were changing into women.

Into lesbian women in all likelihood.

More recruits for a mindless lesbian army she had absolutely no clue what to do with.

Sighing, she closed every folder and file on her screen. None of that really mattered now. I mean, some of it did, obviously, all of it did. But then yesterday happened, and though Serena couldn’t know it, obviously she couldn’t know it, she could feel it, every fiber in her body told her so, told her it had arrived and that it was going to come back. She was sure of it.

I’m sure of it, she thought. Obviously, I’m sure of that.

The chicken had come home to roost.

After all, she was her father’s daughter. And wife. Widow. She was her father’s widow. So she should know.

She had come to work that Saturday, not an unusual occurrence in itself, but with urgency of impending doom. It had come. It had damaged the facilities. It had escaped despite their best efforts. She needed to inspect the facility. She needed to catch up on forgotten items too, having spent too much time dawdling on her daughter’s project and not enough time and attention on getting things done at work.

Still, she could hardly blame herself for that.

Sara had outdone herself. Gloriously outdone herself.

And since Sara was a bit of a prodigy, outdoing herself meant, well, obviously something.

When she saw the video of what her daughter and her little friends did to that Love woman. Well. She’d wished she had been there. God, she would have loved that. That woman looked hot. An absolute hot mess. And that ass. God, she’d have to have that ass one day.

Not to mention that daughter of hers, that Wendy girl. Serena didn’t get the attraction, but she had to admit the girl was a looker, a nice, even beautiful face and body to match. Serena had seen both pictures and recognized a wanton slut when she saw one. Still the ardent desire her daughter Sara had for that girl, she couldn’t figure it out. Teenagers, she supposed.

Still, were all those tears really necessary?

“She won’t answer the phone, mama, and her mother was so mean to me.”

Sara crouched on a chair in the corner of her mother’s expansive and expensive kitchen, her arms huddling her knees against her head as she bawled into the space between her knees.

“Just give it time, honey. I’m sure it will all work out.”

“She left me, mama, she kissed me and then she left me and then she won’t talk to me. She won’t answer her phone.”

“She’ll come back to you, darling. They always do.”

“But I don’t want her to come back! I wanted her to stay! I thought she was going to stay.”

Eventually Sara stood up, wiping her eyes, and brushing off her clothes.

“I’m going to get that mother of hers, though. I’m so going to get her.”

Serena had no doubt of that at the time, and now, having seen what Sara had done. Well.

Like mother, like daughter she supposed. She, Serena Craft, certainly wouldn’t have taken that kind of lip off anyone. Obviously.

Daughters of the same father. Well, kind of sort of father. My mother too. I mean. Those issues drove her batty, and she tried to ignore them, tried to settle on more practical things. Making sure her daughter, her sister received a good education, establishing and advancing the cause and position of her company, the company founded and built by her departed father and mother, by her departed wife and husband. Making sure things got done, making sure the experiments panned out, keeping track of the Living Pink, measuring it out, keeping it secret. Keeping it safe.

I mean, just a little of that stuff, and, well, you could imagine.

She didn’t have to imagine, though. They had the proof in the basement dungeons below.

Corporate espionage was a bitch.

Ah, she understood the need. The need to know, the need to steal, the need to sell to the highest bidder. She understood all that, she didn’t mean any harm to Miss Baker, and truth to tell, had she been caught in time, she would have just been fired, no harm no foul.

But Miss Baker had somehow gone farther than she should have gone, farther than she should have been able, and there you had it. They’d been warned. Stay out of the room behind the steel doors. Don’t even go down that hall. Don’t go beyond the first pair of steel doors. And absolutely, positively don’t go into the room behind the steel door without making sure, and this was really super important sweeties, so please listen up you lovely little things, you’re all just so scrumptious, no going in without absolutely, positively, making sure your lab suit is completely, totally, 100 percent sealed.

For the love of god, don’t go in there without a dV-suit, one of those lovely pale pink suits covering the body from head to toe, interwoven with a metal fabric devised by Nero Craft to keep out the Velikovsky waves. Any casual observer would think that the most adorable astronauts had just landed and were walking the lower levels of The Diana Group Research and Development Center.

The most deliciously cute faces peered out at the world from behind pink-tinted face shields.

Serena could, of course. That went without saying. Maybe not without some prolonged recovery afterward, but she could, although she avoided doing so. Even with the dV-suits, those V-waves were no laughing matter.

Sara, in all likelihood, could have too. But she never tried it. Not that Serena knew about.

But Miss Baker? An intern? How the heck did she even get in there?

Obviously, Serena assumed espionage.

But Miss Baker was hardly in a position to answer questions after they’d pulled her out.

Miss Baker’s orgasm-ravaged body popped into Serena’s mind. How could anybody survive that? Just one orgasm after another, more than one after another, really, more like one on top of another after another, stack on top of stack of orgasms just flooding the poor girl, emptying her mind, ravaging her body, twisting and contorting her body in pitiable convulsions. Forced to seal her in a separate chamber, they kept her alive using an independent air system, nourished her with IV drips which often came loose during those prolonged bouts of paroxysmal orgasms.

Miss Baker had never once emerged consciously from her condition, a condition she suffered for more than a year, while The Diana Group conducted test after test, analysis after analysis. She had received a full dose V-waves from the Living Pink. She had even managed to collect a sample, had made skin contact, air contact, and probably even oral contact with the stuff, and now, well, she was fucked.

Almost literally fucked. Fucked beyond any human ability to fuck, deriving a pleasure beyond any human ability to feel, and she’d continue to feel it. The stuff should have burned her brain out by now, but it just took hold of it, stayed glued to it, her brain, and fed her pleasure after pleasure of orgasm.

Lesbian orgasm, let’s be clear about that, Serena thought.

Women were absolutely forbidden to enter Miss Baker’s chamber.

Those who did had chambers of their own now.

They’d learned the hard way, The Diana Group did, and now they boasted an entire floor of their lower levels (what some of the more daring girls liked to call their “dungeons”) devoted to a small army of orgasm-crazed, mindless lesbians, all of them bed-ridden, shackled to their bedframes lest they damage themselves or wound an assistant, always and exclusively male without exception.

Neither the Living Pink nor the V-waves, it seemed, had any significant effect upon the masculine sex.

Well, most members of the masculine sex. One case, notorious in certain sectors, remained salient.

Serena Craft thumbed through the pages of the Jack Randall book she’d brought with her, after Carla Essenza brought it to her attention.

“He knows too much,” the doctor had said. “How, I do not know. But you should definitely read it. That man needs to be stopped.”

After reading the first few chapters, Serena agreed.

It was an odd book, filled with inexplicable information that no one who did not know would know about, replete with innuendos and shameless hints at even more shameless scandals.

The last pages of the book, a thick paperback, had been left blank, though the title of last chapter promised an exposé about something called The Consortium. Suspecting hidden, secret messages Serena had subjected the book to every conceivable and inconceivable test, but every test resulted in a stunning lack of evidence, every test resulted in one unmistakable but obvious conclusion: the blank pages were blank.

So she checked every database she knew about, but nothing came up on The Consortium. That is to say, all kinds of things came up about various consortiums, but nothing that leapt to the eye or captured the imagination. Nothing that Serena could find out about, at any rate.

She’d even prodded that Rascal character about it, but he, like all Roadmen, knew absolutely nothing. They didn’t even know about The Guild, until just recently. Which made sense. As far as she could tell only her father knew about The Guild. At least her father was the only human who knew about The Guild. That is to say she had always assumed that was the case, when Nero told her about it. Them. But now, looking at the Randall book, she wondered. Did this Jack fellow know? But what made her think this Jack Randall character was, in fact, human? She knew better than to make those kinds of assumptions.

Not that she was paranoid. Vigilant, maybe. But not paranoid.

And if The Guild came along, well, they’d learn not mess the Crafts, that’s all. No one messed with the Crafts.

She’d tried to track him down, that Jack Randall, but tracking him down was hard. No one seemed to know how to find him, no one seemed to know what he looked like, no one seemed to know where he lived. Or even if he existed. Then that Rascal made his report. Jack Randall had met with them at Dos Antonios, some Roadman dive on the east side of town. Fellow existed all right. Called himself a Recorder, but what the heck that was, Rascal couldn’t really say.

“He writes things down.”

“A doodler?”

“No, no, more of a note taker, I think. A scribbler.”

And Jack Randall knew about The Guild. And told the Roadmen about them. So now everybody was beginning to hear about them. But what they did, fuck if anyone knew. Anyone except that Go-Between.

Yeah, she knew about him, too.

As she said, vigilant but not paranoid. Best to know who all the players are, that’s all.

She’d learned that from Nero Craft, her father and husband, her daughter’s father. Or her half-sister’s father. How did that work again?

And how did Jack Randall know all this?

Her father had told her his secret, of course, when she was just a little girl, around eleven or twelve. By that time, he had already become something of a reclusive celebrity, a famous scientist, chemist, inventor, a man who revolutionized the cosmetics industry. He had founded The Diana Group, named after his dear mother, to oversee all production, research and development, publications, and all public relations for his subsidiaries, the largest of which was Therapeutic Transformations. He had amassed fabulous wealth. But he never escaped the notoriety of being Nero Craft, the last man to have seen Betty Blake, the man who got away with murder, some said, hinting at more than murder.
* * *

Glenbogle Trailer Park, located on the east side of town, coincidentally but meaninglessly not more than a mile and half from Dos Antonios, a place Moby never went, sheltered twenty or so single-wides in three rows exposed to the full outpouring of the sun. A few twisted, bedraggled pinyons lined the boundaries of the park, following high fences concealing the trailer park from two busy streets running on two sides, perpendicular to each other, one street running fairly north-south on the east side of the park, and the other fairly east-west on the south side of the park.

Moby’s trailer, a vintage stainless-steel affair with wide rounded ends and no skirting, occupied the last slot on the third row, the row farthest from both roads, looking vaguely interstellar. Moby kept a tidy cluster of potted plants in front of the hitch, where two small propane tanks used to rest, their function taken over by a large exterior tank maintained by the property owner. For a fee, of course. Moby couldn’t forget that.

That Saturday, as Mary sat on Wendy’s bed, explaining her sudden transformation, Moby huddled in a small maroon armchair, threadbare but intact, resting on four short, wobbly legs. He gazed intently at the television, a small portable device from way back, but the television screen was blank. A tall transistor radio in a leather case sat on top of the television, blaring out news and local weather. Moby nodded at the radio and smiled to himself, letting out loud, short, knowing snorts from time to time.

He heard the sound of the white Corollas crunching the gravel beneath their tires over the blabbering noise of the radio.

He cocked his head at the sound of Toyotas parking on the gravel in front of his trailer.

“Figured as much,” he sighed.

The car doors opened and closed. Moby listened to the sounds of heavy shoes on gravel followed by the tread of feet on his wooden steps. Moby saw a fat Roadman in a white, short-sleeved shirt standing in front of the screen door. He recognized the two thinner Roadmen peeking through the door over the first man’s shoulders. They’d come to see him at school last week. Wednesday. Not a bad bunch of people. Inquisitive though. Asked a lot of questions about that pink critter.

The first man knocked on the door frame.

“Door’s open. Come one in.”

Five minutes later, DP, Frank, and Wade clustered in Moby’s tiny living room. DP sharing a space on a small, lived-in sofa propped against the wall perpendicular to the outside wall. Frank squatted on the other end, hands on both knees of this navy-blue slacks. Wade had, with Moby’s permission, pulled a small kitchen chair from the table in the cramped eating area at the front of the trailer. He set it down just to the side of the television so Moby could still watch the radio.

DP looked behind them to stare awkwardly at the large poster, a portrait of a keen-eyed man in an impressive, grizzled beard. They recognized him immediately, of course. Stanton T. Friedman, renowned physicist, philosopher, lecturer, and theoretician whose work spilled into every facet of human existence.

Before sitting down, he turned to Moby.

“May I?”

Moby gave a non-descript gesture of his head that the Roadman took to mean yes.

Wade turned the volume of the radio down. Then he sat in his chair, emulating Frank’s position, knees close together, hands palm down, clutching the caps.

“The thing is we don’t actually know where to get bug powder.”

“Ain’t surprised,” Moby replied. “Stuff’s not easy to get.”

Moby jerked his head towards the back of the trailer.

“I’ve been making it myself, but I ran out with that last batch. It works, but that damned thing can take a heap of the stuff. Still, better than nothing, I suppose.”

Frank leaned forward, elbows on knees, clasping his hands in a loose knot of fingers. Moby eyed his hands closely, on the look-out, but Frank kept the knot loose. Moby relaxed. You couldn’t tell, he knew. You never could tell, but they always gave themselves away sooner or later.

“Well, how do you make it then? The bug powder?”

“High yield sulfur and boric acid mostly. I throw in a bit of diatomaceous earth because, you know, the Seventies.”

“If those two go get some, could you show us how to make it?”

Frank tossed his head at DP.

“Don’t see why not. Might get some beer too on your way back. Might get a couple of six packs. Then again, might get a case. I drink Murica. But Pobe’s good too. You’ll need a 50-pound bags of sulfur, about four 5-pound containers of boric acid, and oh, say about one 25-pound bag of diatomaceous earth. Should be able to get that at Ward’s.“

D made a list from a notepad P handed him. Then they got up and walked out.

Thirty minutes later they came back the 50-pound bag of sulfur and four buckets of boric acid. P struggled to carry the bag of diatomaceous earth, tripping over the last step of the wooden porch but catching himself before he fell on the carpet of Moby’s trailer.

Moby had a workshop set up near the back of the trailer, in the large bedroom. The custodian stripped it of all furniture, set up a worktable with tools and other equipment. He’d slept on the sofa in the living room anyway, when he slept at all, so the arrangement suited him just fine.

It was a cramped and tiny fit.

Wade and Frank squeezed into the workroom, carrying the bags of sulfur and diatomaceous earth, plopping them down on the table with a loud heavy thud. The smaller Moby, carrying a pail of walked to the right side of the table, while DP stood outside the door, peaking through on other side of the door frame. Sulphur and boric acid covered the top of the worktable, and against one wall stood several olive drab canisters. Wade had to squeeze between the side of the table and a large, tall air compressor hugging the wall opposite the canisters. Moby shoved a canister towards the table, opened the top, grabbed one of three aluminum baker’s scoops laying on the table, opened the bag of sulfur, poured two scoops into the canister.

He pulled off the lid to one of the buckets of boric acid and poured three scoops into the tank. He finished by pouring a single scoop of diatomaceous earth into the canister.

“That should do it,” he said, looking at Frank standing beside him. “Two scoops sulfur, three scoops boric acid, one scoop diatomaceous earth. It hates it. I think. Then repeat once more. Or you could go four, six, and two. Your choice, really. Then fill up the rest with air from that compressor. I make sure the gauge on the side of the canister goes at least to 185 psi. That makes a good blast of bug powder.”

“Why the sulfur?”

“Makes it yellow. Bug powder’s got to be yellow. Stinks like hell, though.”

The Roadmen winced at the smell of rotten eggs.

Moby stepped outside the work room.

“You get that beer?” he asked, looking up at P.

D nodded.

“Good boy,” Moby said.

Moby walked to the fridge, saw three six-packs of Murica, pulled a can from the plastic loop, and went back to his armchair to look at the radio, listening to the noise of the Roadmen filling his canisters with homemade bug powder. From time to time the trailer vibrated and shook to the sound of the air compressing bursting to live, giving its breath to the olive drab tanks.

The rotten, sickly smell of sulfur filled the tiny trailer.

The custodial maintenance technician twitched, gibbered, and grinned at the news of the world. Or at least his own small corner of it.

Beyond the barrier in his mind whispers and cries rustled in the darkness, and something underneath the soft or grating voices, coming closer but still far off, the sound of a low droning as of many bees in a fabulously large hive.