“Jack…” She smiled, sighed, misinterpreting the sweep of his eyes, let the cool black velvet robe slither off her shoulders as she wriggled her arms out of the sleeves, breasts bobbing, then half-threw, half let herself fall against him, soft breasts against his self-felt hardness, image-contrast man-woman interface, with his consciousness living on the line between as he felt the full woman-strength of her arms contracted around his ribcage, strong, young, fiercely-tender woman-arms, young and strong and smooth like… like a healthy female animal, like young, like strong, like healthy, like forever.
She giggled against his chest, hooked her naked legs behind his knee, pulled back against the joint with her leg as she shoved her body-weight forward, and toppled him like a puppy over on his back, the warm rug-fur on his naked skin an electric charge erotic contrast with the smooth cool of the velvet robe he had half fallen on. He took the fall lightly, pulling her mock-fiercely down on top of him, dug the kick of the hard real woman-muscles of her shoulders beneath the skin-patina of softness on his finger-tips as she moved, round on round, belly to belly against him.
She pulled off his shorts, and now they were naked against each other, primal Sara pure flesh-taste of rounded masses moving against him in slow funky rhythm, and he reached out with both hands and smoothed her sweet wicked ass real and round and warm legs contracting froglike up and around him, opening herself to him coaxing him in hair-on-hair teasing as her mouth moved up his chest in a quicksilver trail of hard little biting kisses up his neck across his jaw, and he caught a glimpse of white wet pearled teeth and pink tongue-tip, closed his eyes, hips picking up on her slow-building pelvic rhythm as their mouths met.
Mouth to open mouth, tasting her breath in the warm wet soul-deep cave, and like an eruption of massive world-filling wet life-flesh her tongue poured itself into his mouth, filling it, engulfing it, overwhelming him with wet-on-wet sly man-woman role-reversal pleasure, filling his world with a huge, blind, wet-writhing organism, an amorphous damp creature with a will of its own like a blind pulsing thing from deep inside body-secrets, like a thing of glandular sentience from deep inside life’s secret juices overflowing drip-dripping wet huge alive and pulsing, drip-dripping alien life-juices into his mouth, moving and mocking and filling his cheeks with pulsing naked flesh-secret, heavy syrup drip-dripping like green slug-slime tongue-gland warm-blood wetness from carcinoma-ridden bodies of broken babies, choking, crowning him in stolen life-juices, cloying over-sweet immortality-honey from black children sleeping the long slide to Forever, catheters glucose-needles meeting in obscene trunk-line tube of death down his throat, her heavy huge rolling gland-organism-tongue choking him, choking him, choking him, retch-reflexes building against his will toward a gut-heaving spasm of broken black babies glands wet and writhing-tongue life-warm blood-filled blind organism, stolen life-juices filling his mouth in horrid pelvic rhythm—
In a mindless spasm-reaction, he pushed her mouth away as the retch wracked through him in a mercifully-dampening anti-climax, and she lay inert atop him, confused eyes bleeding as he stared at her like a cornered animal, trapped and panting.
“Jack…? Wha…? You…”
She stared down at him with wounded, stunned eyes as he felt the membranes of his cheeks singe-contract like an alum wither-reaction, his tongue a lump of dead shoe-leather in his own mouth.
I just can’t cut it, he realized. Can’t live with the taste of my woman the taste of slug-green glands, tasting the stolen life-juices inside her every time I touch her. I gotta tell her, or we’ll be lumps of dirty meat to each other forever, living a lie forever, lost to each other forever. Gotta tell her, is all, no matter what happens.
“Truth between us, Sara,” he said. “I… there’s something I’ve just gotta tell you.”
She stretched against him, cupped his cheeks in hands that felt like damp leather. “What’s with you? I’ve never seen you like this… When I kissed you it was like kissing a… (Her body twitched against him.) And you got… sick, didn’t you? I felt it.”
“It’s not you, Sara. I swear it’s not you, baby. It’s me, the whole fucking world, Benedict Howards…”
“Benedict Howards? What in hell does making love to me have to do with Benedict Howards?”
Barron grimaced. How the fuck do I say it: see, it’s like this, baby, you’re a murderer, dig? Got stolen glands inside you, just like me, life-juices of broken babies oozing so bloody thick I taste it when I kiss you?
“Sara—oh, what the fuck!” he snarled, feeling a hopeless spasm of futility, a get-it-over-with, riff-it-out, retch-reaction. “There just isn’t any easy way to tell you. We’re murderers, Sara, we’re both murderers. Yeah, we got immortality inside us—but you know what it looks like? Looks like slimy green glands—ever see a gland?—all green and wet and dripping ugly slimy stuff, but it keeps you alive, and us it keeps alive forever, glands is all, and you live forever. But they’re not our glands, Sara, we stole ’em. Stole ’em from children, dead, broken children…”
And his body writhed in a gooseflesh spasm.
Her eyes seemed to draw back light-years distant; he felt her body go limp, her hands fall like dead flounders to his chest as she muttered, “What are you talking about?”
“What Howards did to us,” he said, “the immortality treatment. It’s a gland-transplant, is all. They irradiate glands to keep ’em in perfect balance, and then they keep your body from aging, forever, something they call Homeostatic Endocrine Balance. But not our glands, dig? Children’s glands. It only works on children’s glands. That’s why Howards killed Hennering—he found out the Foundation is buying the children, soaking them in hard radiation to balance their endocrine system, then transplanting their glands to make adults immortal.”
“But… but the children, what does… losing their glands do to the children?”
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Barron shouted, the vibration bouncing her bare breasts against him. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It kills them, Sara, it kills them! If the radiation hasn’t killed them first, the transplant operation kills them, and they just throw away the bodies like so much garbage. Because you and I are alive and immortal, two kids Howards bought for the purpose are dead. It’s murder, I’m trying to tell you, pure, simple murder!”
He felt-saw her cringe in a fetal-spasm, shoulders hunching away from his chest knees upward along his thighs, like paper wilting in a fire. Her jaw went slack, the depths of her eyes seemed to take a discontinuous jump backward like a quick-cut reverse-zoom camera image. “Murder… murder… murder…” She mouthed the word over and over, chewing it to two meaningless gibberish syllables.
Barron grabbed her cheeks in both hands, shook her. Her body relaxed, but her eyes were still way out there, light-years away, buried in electric-circuit insulation, and when she spoke it was like a message from a spacecraft commander, cold and detached, from somewhere north of Pluto.
“Inside of us? Children’s glands? Children? Cutting apart children? Cutting open living children, tearing out pieces of living flesh and sewing them inside of me? Children?”