They kill, p.13
They Kill, page 13
He might not be as lost as you think, Sierra thought.
“I have something I really need to do right now, Mandy, so if you’ll excuse me….”
She started to go, but Mandy took hold of her arm and stopped her. The woman’s hand felt moist, almost as if she were sweating, and she could’ve sworn that Mandy moved her thumb back and forth the merest fraction, as if caressing her skin.
“Today’s the anniversary of the accident, isn’t it?” Mandy said. “It might make you feel better to come to the meeting. You could tell us about Jeffrey. What he was like, how you’ve dealt with his loss.” She paused, then added, “How he died.”
Sierra pulled her arm free from Mandy’s grip and scowled.
“What do you mean ‘How he died’?”
“The accident happened after a fight with his boyfriend, didn’t it?”
Sierra had been so grief-stricken in those first days after her brother’s death that when Mandy had approached her and asked if there was anything she could to do help, Sierra told her the details of what had happened, all of them. Now she regretted letting her guard down around the woman.
“Your brother is in a sinful relationship with another man, has an argument with him, and drives off just as a powerful storm is gathering…. Some might see that as a sign.”
Sierra was getting angry now.
“Are you suggesting that god killed my brother to punish him for being gay?”
Mandy shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything, but I do find it interesting that—”
Sierra grabbed hold of Mandy’s shoulders and slammed her against her office door. Mandy didn’t look surprised at all by Sierra’s reaction. On the contrary, Sierra thought she detected a flicker of a smile cross the woman’s face. But it was gone before she could tell if it had been real or just her imagination.
“I don’t give a shit what you believe,” Sierra said. “You want to hate gays? Fine, go ahead. But when you try to spread your hatred to other people under the guise of championing ‘Traditional Values’, that’s when I have a problem.”
She glanced at Mandy, but the woman looked back at her smugly, as if by shoving her against the door, Sierra had proven something Mandy had always suspected about her.
Some of the anger left Sierra then, and she let go of Mandy and stepped back.
“Just leave me alone from now on. Please.”
Then she turned and hurried off down the hallway. There was a water fountain at the end of the hall, and a man was bent over it drinking. He wore a black suit – a very deep black, like a starless night sky that went on forever. He had to hold his long blond hair back to keep it from getting wet as he drank. For a moment, Sierra thought she recognized him, but she couldn’t place where she might’ve seen him before. As she passed the man, he glanced in her direction and gave her a wink.
Jesus, she thought. What the hell is it with all the weirdos today?
* * *
Mandy stood in her office doorway and watched Sierra walk away. She was a pretty girl, even if she did tend to dress on the frumpy side, and she had an interesting way of swaying her hips as she walked, the motion somehow demure and provocative at the same time. Mandy wondered if it was something she did on purpose, or if it was completely unconscious. She suspected the latter. Sierra didn’t strike her as the overtly sexual type. Even so, a temptress was a temptress, whether or not she intended to be one, and Mandy didn’t approve. She was careful about the way she walked, was always aware of roving eyes upon her. Men, women, it didn’t matter. Their hearts overflowed with lust, and they sized up everyone they saw in terms of how attractive they were and whether or not they wanted to fuck them. Mandy made sure to comport herself in public in such a way as to not fuel their wickedness any further. Her manner of dress, her almost complete lack of makeup, the asexual way she moved…. They were all part of her camouflage, a way of rendering herself sexually invisible.
And for the most part, it worked. Oh, there were some men – and women – who were attracted to her ice queen persona. They viewed it as a public cover for a secret sexual inferno blazing inside her. Or they saw her as a challenge: could they manage to break through her passionless exterior and awaken the real woman inside? Mandy always rebuffed advances from these people, and while she knew it probably wasn’t charitable of her, she enjoyed seeing their disappointment and frustration when she denied them.
Despite the Traditional Values Club’s focus on combatting homosexuality, Mandy had nothing against gays specifically. She was against all forms of immoral sexual activity. Sex before marriage, sex outside of marriage, promiscuity, masturbation, polyamory…. Basically, if it involved genitals and didn’t have anything to do with procreation, she considered it wicked and sinful. But she wasn’t a fool. She knew that an overall anti-sex message would fall on deaf ears in this culture, where sex was celebrated and encouraged in all aspects of life. She viewed her crusade against homosexuality as a starting point, a loose thread to tug on that would hopefully lead to the entire sweater unraveling eventually. Turn people against gay sex, and then you could turn them against other types of immoral sexual behavior. It was like working a complex math problem. It had to be accomplished one step at a time.
Mandy had come to understand the evils of sexuality when she was in junior high. She’d developed breasts earlier than most of the other girls, and her new boobs drew everyone’s attention. The boys, who even at the beginning of adolescence were little more than sex-obsessed animals, couldn’t keep their eyes off her. Sometimes in class they’d rub their crotches while looking at her. Teachers were fixated on her tits as well. The male teachers’ gazes always fell to her breasts whenever she passed, and the female teachers gave her sympathetic looks, as if they understood what she was going through. Most of the female teachers, that is. Some of them looked at her with disapproval, and she could guess what they were thinking: There goes a slut in training.
The situation only got worse in high school. Her breasts grew even larger, and she developed an hourglass figure that drove boys wild and made the other girls resent her. She did her best to ignore the stares and the glares, to pretend she didn’t hear the crude comments as she walked through the halls.
How can you stand up straight with those things?
Man, what I wouldn’t give to jugfuck her!
I could suck on those titties for days!
Somehow she made it through her freshman year. She hoped her sophomore year might be better, that maybe the other kids would be a little more mature this year. But it was just as bad as ever. Worse, because now boys were hitting on her all the time. They acted as if they liked her, but the entire time they spoke to her, their gazes kept dropping to her chest.
But then one day Ronnie Neal, a junior who played on the school’s baseball team, approached her. He was good-looking and nice, and he didn’t look at her boobs the entire time he spoke to her. He asked her out to a movie, she accepted, and he was a gentleman the entire time. Eventually, they had sex, and while it was scary and awkward, it was also loving and wonderful, and for the first time she was glad she had a woman’s body, grateful for the pleasures she could give and receive.
She fell in love with Ronnie – or, at least, what a fifteen-year-old who’s beginning to explore her sexuality thinks of as love – and they had sex several more times. She thought she was living in the best of all possible worlds, and she no longer cared if people stared at her breasts. Let them look. She loved Ronnie, and she was pretty sure he loved her, and to hell with everyone else.
And then came the day when Ronnie said he had a surprise for her. His parents had gone out of town for the weekend, and they had the house to themselves. He wanted to have sex in his parents’ bed, an idea she found a little icky but also a little sexy. More than a little. He told her to get naked and slide under the sheets, and she did, him standing there fully clothed and watching her. Then he told her to wait right there while he got the surprise ready. He left the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind him.
The sheets were invigoratingly cool on her bare skin, and she wiggled on the mattress, enjoying the sensation. Her nipples were hard as rocks and throbbed with a delicious ache, and she was so wet between her legs that she could feel the fluid moistening her thighs and dampening the sheet beneath her. She wondered what sort of surprise Ronnie had for her. Was he putting on some sexy underwear that he’d bought without her knowing? Was he bringing something from the kitchen, like chocolate sauce or whipped cream that they would smear over each other’s bodies and lick off while they screwed?
The door opened and Ronnie – naked, full erection bobbing as he walked – came into the bedroom. But he wasn’t alone. Four other boys followed, friends of his from the baseball team, all of them just as naked and hard as he was. None of the boys said a word as they took up positions around the bed, two on each side, Ronnie at the foot. Ronnie pulled the sheet off her, wadded it up, and tossed it in a corner. He was smiling. The other boys were smiling. Then all five of them crawled onto the bed and onto her.
She didn’t remember much after that. She remembered hands and mouths and cocks and pain and cum, but no faces. Thank Christ, no faces.
Afterward, Ronnie’s friends left without a word, and when they were gone, Mandy started crying. Ronnie told her he was sorry, that he’d thought she’d enjoy it, that he never would’ve invited his friends over if he’d known she’d react like this. He got into bed and tried to hold her, but she pushed him away so violently he rolled off and fell on the floor. He got pissed then and told her if she was going to be a whiny little cunt then she should get dressed and get her whore ass the hell out.
She did so, crying the entire time. She cried a lot more during the rest of the weekend, and on Monday she feigned illness so she could stay home. Her parents made her go back to school on Tuesday and as she walked through the hallway to her locker, she saw the smirks and the disapproving looks, and the sheer loathing that was in so many of the students’ eyes, and she felt a deep shame. She knew what had happened hadn’t been her fault, but that didn’t change the way she felt.
She never spoke to Ronnie again, and he soon moved on to a new girl. She didn’t date again in high school, but when she got to college – where no one knew about her past – she’d tried to have relationships, but they always ended badly, if they managed to get off the ground in the first place. By the time she started her doctoral program, she’d not only given up on sex, she’d begun to see society’s obsession with it as a pernicious defect of the human animal, one which needed to be corrected. She’d found a purpose in life, a higher calling, and for the first time since the moment Ronnie had led his friends into his parents’ bedroom, she was happy.
Mandy was so lost in her memories that she wasn’t aware anyone had approached her until she heard a man speak.
“Ready for the meeting?”
Startled, she turned to see Conrad Haskell standing next to her. Conrad was shorter than she was, almost fifteen years older, and he had what was euphemistically referred to as a dad bod, but she still thought he was a good-looking man. He had a full head of thick brown hair, and he always wore bow ties that he tied himself. No clip-ons for him. She liked his smile too, found it warm and genuine. But what she liked most about him was that he was a complete beta male, easily led. Compliance was an extremely attractive quality in a person, Mandy thought.
She suspected Conrad might have a crush on her, but he wasn’t the kind of man who’d come out and admit it. He was the type who’d wait until she approached him romantically, convinced that some day she would. The poor fool.
Conrad was co-advisor on the Traditional Values Club with her, and he was dedicated to the cause of promoting a higher moral standard on campus. But while Mandy was primarily concerned with sexual matters, Conrad – who taught political science – was a proponent of every hard-right conservative stance there was, both social and economic. He had a tendency to lecture people on politics, which quickly became tiresome, but he was an effective ally in her work, and she appreciated his assistance.
She gave him a smile.
“Central Duplicating delivered some new flyers. They came out looking pretty good, I think.”
She walked into her office, and Conrad remained outside, always the perfect gentleman. She was disappointed. She found the idea of being alone with him in the confined space of her office – where they would be forced to stand close to each other – to be a pleasant one. But she shouldn’t think such things, and she banished the thought from her mind. She picked up the stack of flyers, turned out her office light, and closed the door. She handed Conrad a flyer from the top of the stack and he examined it.
“Looks great.” He handed it back. “I especially like the title. It’s catchy and thought-provoking.”
The topic for today’s discussion was Who’s in Charge – You or Your Sex Organs? Beneath the title was information on joining the Traditional Values Club, along with the web addresses for sites dealing with abstinence and how to combat homosexual urges.
“But don’t you think the phrase –” he lowered his voice, “ – sex organs is a little graphic?”
“That’s the point. If we used genitals it wouldn’t have the same impact.”
“I, ah, suppose so.”
She enjoyed watching him squirm. The word sex alone was enough to make him uncomfortable, but with organs attached to it, she thought he might come down with a case of the vapors and fall back onto his fainting couch.
“How about I head on down to the library and make sure everything’s ready?” he asked.
There was no need. The meeting room had a lectern for a speaker to stand at and a half dozen round tables with plastic chairs arranged around them. It was always the same every time they used it. But Conrad was an anxious person, and one way he managed his anxiety was by over-preparing.
“Sounds good,” she said. As if I could stop you, she thought.
Conrad smiled with more than a little relief. “Okay. See you in a bit.”
He still had the flyers, and he took them with him as he left. She had no doubt that when she arrived at the meeting room, he’d have neatly placed the flyers on each table, one per chair, with the rest left on the lectern in case they received a larger crowd than they expected and needed to distribute extras. They’d never had that large a crowd yet, but she admired Conrad’s optimism.
She went back inside her office to answer a couple emails and respond to a voicemail, and then she turned off the light and closed the door. As she locked it, a powerful thirst came over her. It felt as if she hadn’t had anything to drink in days. Her throat felt as if it were swelling shut and she found it hard to breathe. What in the world was happening to her? Was she having some kind of allergic reaction? She’d eaten a salad in the cafeteria for lunch, but she hadn’t put anything on it that she hadn’t had before.
She hurried toward the drinking fountain at the end of the hallway. She wanted to run, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, so she settled for a fast walk. When she reached the fountain, she abandoned any pretense of normal behavior. She lowered her head to the nozzle, pressed the push button, and water streamed into her mouth. She slurped and gulped like an animal, water spilling over her chin and dripping into the basin. But no matter how much she drank, her throat remained swollen. More, it seemed to be getting worse. If she couldn’t get some relief soon, she was afraid her airway would be cut off entirely. She’d pass out then, and if she didn’t receive prompt medical attention, there was a good chance she’d die. She felt herself start to panic, and she was about to lift her head from the fountain and go seek help when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. A man was walking past, one she’d seen before, when she was speaking with Sierra. She’d never seen him before then but given his suit – which was such an odd black – and his long hair, she thought he might be a new, somewhat eccentric, faculty member.
Thank god, she thought. He’ll see I’m in distress and help me. I’ll be okay. I’ll—
She turned her head to look at him, tried to say something, but she couldn’t get any words past her swollen throat. He kept walking, not bothering to spare even a short glance in her direction. She thought she would have to reach out and grab his arm as he passed, shake him and force him to pay attention. But before she could, his hand strayed toward the water nozzle, and his index finger tapped it. Just once, but his fingernail made the metal ring, as if he’d struck a bell. And then something else began coming out of the nozzle, a thick viscous substance that splattered into the basin as it fell, collecting in thick globs that refused to go down the drain. Her face remained close to the fountain, although she’d raised her head enough when she tried to speak that the muck didn’t strike her. Revulsion filled her, and she was about to draw back and step away from the fountain when the smell hit her.
It was a foul salty musk that she couldn’t name, but which she nevertheless recognized on a primal level. She breathed it in, unable to stop herself, and as she did her revulsion fell away to be replaced by need. So strong, so overwhelming, that she couldn’t have stopped herself if she wanted to, and she most definitely did not want to.
She leaned her face to the thick stream and drank greedily. If she’d drank like an animal before, now she did so like a frenzied beast, vigorously lapping at the stream, reaching into the basin with her hands to gather the globs of muck and jam them into her face. She moaned and snarled as she swallowed, shaking her head rapidly back and forth as if trying to force the gooey substance down faster to make room for more. The swelling in her throat eased, as did her breathing, but she barely noticed. All she cared about right then was getting as much of this glorious stuff into her belly as she could. A memory came to her as she swallowed mouthful after mouthful. Ronnie and her lying in bed after having sex, the air filled with the mingled scents of their lovemaking. His semen, her vaginal fluid blending together into a heady perfume of lust. That’s what she was drinking now, that scent given physical form.
