Quick Marcie: “As long as you also fuck the love out of us as frequently and as diligently as you can.”
“Oh, Jesus in heaven, what have we here!” He thought then of the baby. “We ought to check on Jenny.”
Laura groaned. “I guess I’d better. No need for you two to get out of bed.”
“No, I mean I want all three of us to go.” He warmed to the idea. “No clothing, just as we are, hugged through the apartment, shushing one another into Jenny’s room, and peeking into the bassinet. I want to hold you close. I’d like to touch your beautiful naked flanks under moonlight, as Jenny sleeps below.”
They grumbled, but they acquiesced.
The air in the baby’s room was warm and close, but it concentrated his daughter’s perfect smell and that was one virtue in it at least. She looked the perfect angel lying there.
Travis reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no alarming in his head. “My baby,” Laura gasped, then rushed in. Marcie followed and Travis came after, praying it wasn’t what he feared.
Laura lifted the limp child in her arms, a wet bundle of laundry. Travis snapped on the overhead: no blinkback of light from the baby, not even a brief squeeze of closed eyelids.
He saw the reddish froth at Jenny’s nostrils and mouth. From the floor, the space heater roared obscenely.
“Quick,” said Marcie. “The changing table.” Box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick.
Then Laura’s mouth came down upon her child’s.
Travis felt helpless, paralyzed. Standing beside his wife, he steadied the baby’s forehead, useless gesture but something.
It was cold and dead. He saw the tiny fingers with their blue-tinged nails. His head swelled in the bad heat of the room.
Abruptly, near where his hands held dead temples, the baby’s eyes flew open; and her mouth lit into Laura’s face like a weasel-toothed hair-clipper plowing out of control, gone from his hands. Up her cheek the mouth pranced, path of red gouge gurgling Laura’s screams. There by the table he and Marcie tried to wrestle her away, waltzing absurdly against the table edge as if it were crucial that they not drift too far from it.
Behind them, the window imploded jags of winter night upon them, an angled torrent of glass filling the air, and then, in plain sight behind his lovers, a young dead woman dragged herself over jagged shards, white red-zipped torso snagging there but coming on anyway, bringing in hordes of stenched dead in her wake. His dead infant unlatched from Laura and dove for him like screaming hell, the bright air no barrier to its bloody-mouthed leap.
What the fuck is happening here, was the thought that spun in his brain as the side of his face lit up, what the fucking blue blazes is happening here?
Perfection. Things had come together just as he had hoped they would. Jenny, sleeping peacefully below in her bassinet, held a lifetime’s promise beneath those precious eyelids. After ages of lust for his upstairs neighbor, he had enjoyed her and found her overwhelmingly more sensuous than his most detailed jag-fant of her. And there wasn’t, no not in the slightest, an iota of jealousy—if anything, he found an amazingly complementary desire—in Laura.
A snap at Jenny’s window. He veered his head.
“What, silly?” Laura said.
“That sound startled me.” A tracery of white webbing made the pane appear fractured.
“Just sub-zero stuff.”
But he unhugged them and crossed the warm rug and off on cold floorboards in the moonlit room, peering out upon the smooth blue drifts in the alley, the windowless brick facade over yonder. Utter peace. Marcie, drifting behind him, swept to his left, gentling a hand on his shoulder, a thigh hot against his thigh. “What’s out there?”
“Not a thing, sweet love. Just deep freeze and a lot of sleeping souls.” Even the sirens had stopped.
Laura joined them, her hands like tickling lilies at their waists, her hip-lyre at their buttocks. Saying not a word, she kissed his left shoulder and rested her cheek there, hairfall a new tickle. Travis, replete with peace and contentment, raised a hand to the window, benedictive gesture, felt the wall of cold air an inch away, touched a palmpress to the surface frost, drew away. Marvelous, how thin the barrier was between unsurvivability and a perfect moment. He was grateful, beyond gratitude, to be standing on this side of that barrier, safe, loved, an heir to such bounty as he’d never known could exist on this earth.
It happened when he kissed Marcie’s cheek. A sudden insuck of breath, the pulling tight of soft flat belly at his right palm where it lay above her Brillo-flare of red private hair. He swerved up to look, caught a glimpse of blue-puffed flesh, but was buffeted by the cold coming in on a shatter of glass, nothing there, a flicker of dream, everything there, too sudden the assault, the rag-wrapped gnarled knuckles smashing through triangling glass to lay claim to his life. Flat pane onto empty alley. A flying mass of forced shards and the influx of stench and bodies and hands and mouths coming in too fast to react to. His wife reaching under his cleft to brush against his balls, feeling his prick stiffen in response. The insuck of air filled with slashes of glass and a naked woman—scored at torso like a zipper of guts—diving in to kiss a visegrip chaw deep into his turned cheek. “Let’s go back to bed,” Marcie wantoned into his ear, as, giddying upon a peak of ecstasy, he gazed at a zigzag of bricks over yonder. His legs failed him under the flying assault of his attacker, her arms impossibly strong, her face fastened to his where it bit and tore. Beneath his attempts to scream, his eyes caught Laura, pinned under a half-formed male monstrosity, whose huge meaty hand boned into her breast and ripped it up and away like a flesh balloon filled with pudding, its mouth its goal as Laura screamed and resisted him without effect. Baby Jenny gave a tiny cry of protest, then fell silent, and Travis shared a smile with his lovers. “She’s okay, I think,” he said, “and I bet the three of us could find something nice to do in the other room.” A vision of hunger flickered at the window, nothing, the startle of an eyeblink, emptiness out there. “Help me,” Marcie shouted, but he couldn’t turn and a winterfall of cold air and meat gone way bad assaulted his senses as hands gripped one leg and raised it up to a mouth, and a dead tongue brushed the toes of his other foot. Not a sound outside. The sharded air screamed with sirens, police and ambulance, firetrucks and air attack, a doomsday medley of wails at each other’s throats in a threnody of pain. The women dropped to their knees, backed Travis’s butt onto the cold sill, mouthed at his shaft with teasing warm wet lips and tongue, while his shoulderblades touched and shied away from the flat frosty pane of glass.
Smash to either side and a give as if it’d been open all this time, tumbling backward, then yanked by brute force through and back into an alley full of subway-packed shuffling forms.
They tugged him down onto the rug and one impaled herself on him while the other pussied at his face, Laura’s taste, and from above came the sounds of kissing as Marcie pistoned about his penis, and his tongue did a new-angled, newfangled dance at clit and labia. The woman bit and tore mercilessly at his jaw, and the pain of teeth closing on foot and thigh lit up his head and forced his muscles to the straining point. But then a shambleman loomed up and arrowed down into his belly, a clutch there like food poisoning cramping him up, but from the outside. And it got worse and worse, not subsiding for a breather, but attacking deeper and with pain unending.
Laura came, burrowing and rocking at his mouth so that for a spell he couldn’t breathe, but then he maneuvered his nose in time for Marcie’s climax—Laura having fingered her clit where he and Marcie groined together—and he shot his seed deep into her, his moans muted by the wet luff of Laura’s cunt. He died there on that rug, red bleed on gray, grave-soiled tufts of fabric. They collapsed upon him, laughing at the freeing licentiousness of their hearts, doubled femininity asquirm where it most mattered. Rising, swim of the room into his ken, he watched Laura feeding the baby to Marcie and the others. Its bawling had torn free of siren scowl, but now ripped down into stillness. He kissed their hands and whispered “I love you” into Marcie’s then Laura’s ear, then left Jenny’s room with them, softly closing the door while blowing his sleeping girl a kiss. Bladder and bowel gave way then in the overheated room, but it would be four hours too late before the door again opened. And he went, ravenous, for the smashed window, dragging himself across the shards of glass, watching indifferently one arm slice open like dark gristled meat detaching from chicken wing, lunging away from the window-shattered warmth and on into the unending hunger of a long winter’s night.