Anonymous Rex (32 page)

I
was out of there just after the flesh started flying, but I managed to get nicked by a few stray claws and tails during my retreat. Chaos erupted the moment Solomon laid it out for us, made it clear that Vallardo was attempting to facilitate an interspecies birth, and it wasn’t seconds later that scattered skirmishes broke out all throughout the basement, miniature battles of rage and confusion. Dr. Solomon, who certainly wasn’t expecting the violent reaction in which the Council specializes, took a nasty club wound to the head before he was able to gather enough strength to pull himself up the basement stairs; Johnson, engaged in a no-holds-barred grudge match with Kurzban, sure wasn’t going to help the elderly doctor this time.

So as blood, sweat, and bile splattered the basement walls, I grabbed Mrs. Nissenberg and dragged her into the far corner.

“You have to watch me sign this,” I said, and pulled out a copy of the rectification papers. All the while, I was ducking tails, parrying claws, trying anything to remain unharmed and unmolested.

We went through the short motions of signing and notarizing, and then it was all over—I’d officially been kicked out of the Council for good. Mrs. Nissenberg wished me good luck, and I braved a few more swats and close calls on my way up the stairs.

Now, in the rush back to my apartment, no less than eight moving violations are committed by yours truly, including the running of a light that was a good ten seconds into its red cycle. Somebody up there likes me, or at least enjoys watching my shenanigans enough to let me live another day.

But how can I be blamed for breaking a few little traffic rules when my brain is occupied with so many other matters? I need to get back to the apartment, round up whatever valuables I can find, hock them for as much as I can get out of Pedro, the guy who runs the Cash 4 Crap store on Vermont, and get myself another plane ticket to New York. I need to confront Vallardo—I need to confront Judith—I need to find Sarah again, if only to take her out to dinner, squash any notions of this nonsensical relationship, and put an end to what was so unwittingly and unwisely begun.

Solomon’s explanation of Vallardo’s papers seals it—McBride’s mind had indeed taken a long walk off a short pier, but the crazy apefucker had enough cash and enough similarly insane friends to pull off his delusion.

But what amazes me—what sickens me—is that his love for a human—his love for Sarah—was so great that he actually felt the need to father her children. If Sarah ever knew of the bestiality she’d been engaged in, I’m sure it would mortify her to death, but this new information—it might make that mortification literal.

A foreclosure notice has been tacked to the front door of my ground-level apartment, and I angrily rip it off, tear it into little bits, and scatter it along the dirt. The locks have been changed as well, but an overdrawn, otherwise useless credit card gains me quick entrance to my—
my
, damn it—home.

The power’s off—I knew it would happen eventually—which means that the funky smell comes from the spoiled leftovers in my refrigerator. I stumble through the house, banging my shins in the darkness. The only good thing about the power outage is that the answering machine light is not blinking at me.

Microwave, blender—hey, the TV’s still there. The appliances scattered around the apartment should be enough to score me a coach seat back to New York; even if I have to sit on the wing, I’ll take it.

But there’s no chance of me going back tonight. The sun’s about to
set, and even if I could somehow haul all of this crap into the car, I wouldn’t make it to Pedro’s before closing time.

I am in dire need of a nap. The last time I slept long enough to actually drop into a REM cycle was … let’s see … two nights ago at the Plaza. Counting on my fingers—which are blurring, separating—makes it nearly forty hours I’ve gone without more than the occasional doze, and I’m amazed that I’m functioning at all. They haven’t taken away my bed yet, so I decide to close the shades, lie down, and get in a few minutes of shut-eye.

The doorbell rings. I don’t know how much later it is, but the sun has set and the streetlights have popped to life. The usually pleasant electronic chimes that I hooked up to my buzzer last Christmas tear away at my nerves, jangling my eardrums, as the battery-powered bell goes off again. I take a quick peek outside my window, toward the small parking lot in front of my apartment complex, but I don’t see any cars other than those belonging to the humans and dinos who live nearby. Off to one side I can make out the hood of what might be a Lincoln parked just behind our Dumpster, but I can’t be sure. Dragging my sluggish frame as quickly as I can, I move to the door and take a gander through the peephole, ready to whip off my gloves and bare my claws if need be. My tail twitches in involuntary anticipation, pulse revving at the starting gate.

It’s Sarah. White silk blouse, short black skirt, legs, legs, legs.

The only thing I am thinking is that there is nothing that I am thinking. I’ve collared a few bad apples in my day who’ve stood stock solid as I dragged them downtown, and I always wondered why they had that deer-in-the-headlights look. Now I know—the brain shuts down when and where it wants to. It does not follow a schedule.

Sarah smiles at the door, at the peephole, expecting me to be watching her, and the walleye lens distorts her features, spreads her lips into a goldfish pucker, extends her teeth into great white monoliths, narrows her eyes. Horrifying. I throw open the door.

Without a word, we embrace, my arms encircling her body, pulling her close. If I could envelop her, I would. If I could make her a part of my body, suck her in, incorporate her, I would. She grasps my waist
tightly, holding on as if to secure herself against a steady wind, her head pressed against my chest, her hair flung up, over, surrounding my nose, her artificial perfume beautiful to me despite its synthetic components.

We kiss. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again, and I can’t help it so we kiss. It lingers. It sends flares shooting through my head. My hands move all about her body, outlining her curves, her exquisite lines, and I would like nothing more than to rip this guise off my skin so that I might feel her with my true hands, understand her with my real person.

I want to ask her why she’s here, when she got in, where she’s staying, but I know there will be time for that. Later. Later. Still silent, Sarah takes my hand, squeezes it, and I understand the question implicit in that grasp. I squeeze back and lead my human lover toward the bedroom.

Body is in full control, eyes and brain watching from the bleachers, cheering me on. Sarah undresses me—the outer me—slowly unbuttoning my shirt, pulling it off, tossing it carelessly on the floor. Hands rubbing against my chest, transferring the warm, firm touch to the real skin deep inside. I grab her breasts firmly, my first feel of a human, and she moans softly in response. Whatever I’m doing, it must be right. Sarah leans down and licks the hair on my chest, running her tongue past my nipples, down to my stomach. My guised-up torso is fair enough under human terms—not enough to land me in any of your finer ladies’ magazines, mind you, but I’ve been told by those in the know that I have a passable chest and above-average abs. Still, with Sarah’s gaze tickling every inch of my body, I do wish I had shelled out the cash for those pectoral attachments.

Sarah, smiling sweetly as we move to kiss each other yet again, doesn’t seem to mind my “natural” body in the slightest, and she moves her attention below my waist, her hands gaining speed, moving from sensual to frantic as she works off my belt, cracking it through the air. Zippers sliding along now, buttons popping off, pants flying into the established heap on the ground, I go to town, being careful not to wrinkle, to crush, as I fumble with buttons and straps and hooks. Women’s clothing, though a pain in the tail, is infinitely more delicate than our rough-and-tumble wear, and I have to force myself not to tear the fabric off her body in frustration and anticipation.

I am unaware of just how or when we made it to the bed itself, but as my eyes open in the aftermath of the deepest, most satisfying kiss these lips have ever had the honor of experiencing, I find myself cuddled up with Sarah atop my green and blue patchwork quilt, naked as the day I donned my first guise.

Sarah, too, is nude. And breathtaking. Literally—after a few moments of watching her lithe body squirm in anticipation of things to come, I am forced to slap myself in order to bring about a gasp of oxygen. Once again, Sarah brings my face to hers, cupping my cheeks in her two delicate hands, fingernails caressing my outer skin but still oh so delicious, and we roll together, moving as one as I prepare to betray my species in the most beautiful way I can possibly imagine.

A dino female—and most males, I should imagine—approaches sex in a very rational, practical fashion. The act itself is treated almost as an obligation, not to her mate, her partner, or her own intrinsic femininity, but to the species itself. It is as if we have been unable to work our way out from under the thumb of raw animalistic urges despite a good hundred million years of evolution. When the time comes to procreate (or at least go through the motions), the time comes to procreate, and woe betide the creature who tries to stop a dino female from having her way.

But there is a world beyond, I know now, a level deeper than any Tantric manual can provide. How could I have gone so long without this?

Of course, in the past, I had no experience outside of my own species, no clue that anything was absent from the equation. But now, as I move my body with Sarah’s, my costumed skin all but invisible to my hyperextended senses, I realize that there is so much more to this act, an element of sensuality that I have been missing all along. With dinos, flesh grinds and gyrates, hide rubbing roughly into a hot layer of friction. With humans—with Sarah—flesh swells, billows, condenses, an undulation of one. As I stroke myself in and out of her warmth, my engorged member tight against the confines of the polysuit extension, tight within the confines of my new lover, she moves with me, our energies coalescing into one great wave of movement and heat. With dinos, the sounds are shrieks and moans, howls to the religion of pleasure. With Sarah, there are soft murmurs and syncopated heartbeats, delicate gasps and whispers to the night.

I do not feel guilty in the least.

When it is over, when we are spent, when our arms fall to our sides, exhausted from holding one another so close, so tightly, I draw from the last remaining reserves of my energy and place my forearm beneath Sarah’s fragile body, nestling her against my chest. It is not macho to cuddle, but my usually ubiquitous sense of self-consciousness has left the building, having been put out for the night like a naughty cat.

Staring at each other, words still unspoken, eyes focusing on eyes, pupils still dilating in the darkened bedroom, her green irises set off beautifully against the shock of red hair cascading across her cheek, I am unable to stop my hands from roaming, searching out her body in their own journey across the uncharted. I fondle her breast, teasing the nipple with my fingertips. I have never touched a human breast before this night, and I find it oddly firm, sensually so.

We make love again. I do not know where I find the energy, but if I ever locate that source, I might be ready to set up shop with a perpetual-motion patent.

One of us must speak first. I suppose it’s possible for her to silently dress herself, kiss me, and walk out of my town house without so much as a word the entire time; I suppose it would be romantic, fantastically so perhaps, but someone as garrulous as myself couldn’t let that happen. And though I cringe as the PI who rents out space in my mind steps up and asks for a word with the landlord, I do indeed have a few questions to ask.

“How was the flight?” I begin. Sarah is still naked, splayed across the bed; I have covered my costumed body with the quilt. I am cold, my circulation poor. I really ought to see a physician.

She laughs, a high giggle that makes me want to leap up and start all over again despite the strange tingle emanating from my tail and lower extremities. I hope that those repetitive thrusting motions didn’t damage my girdle; at the first possible moment I should run to the bathroom and check the apparatus out. A snapped girdle can cause serious circulation problems, which can, in turn, cause temporary and, in some cases, permanent loss of feeling in the affected areas.

“How was the flight?” Sarah repeats, tossing her hair away from her face. “That’s what you want to ask me?”

“Figured I’d be asking you at some point, might as well make it now. Good a time as any.” I give her nose a peck.

“The flight was fine,” she said. “Would you like to know what movie we saw?”

“I’d be delighted to know.”

“We saw
Spartacus
.”

“Isn’t that sort of an old movie?”

“It was an old plane. Besides, it took up most of the flight.” She yawns, stretches, and I watch her muscles strain with the effort. “So now you get to ask me what you really want to ask me, which is why I’m in Los Angeles.”

“Well … now that you mention it …”

“A singing gig.”

“A singing gig.” I am skeptical.

Sarah lowers her eyes, runs a finger across my chest. “You don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I say. “It’s that I figured, maybe …” Maybe she came all this way just to see me. I can’t finish the sentence; it reeks of femininity.

“I found a message on my machine after I got back from your hotel. My agent got me a studio gig singing background on a B. B. King album. We’ve been recording all day.”

“And then you decided to come in and see me? So I’m secondary?”

Sarah tickles me, a vicious blitzkrieg that sends me rolling across the bed before I’m able to mount my own counterattack. Soon enough, we’re kissing once again like teenagers going at it on the living-room sofa before the parents get home.

We lie in silence for some time, holding each other, reveling in the perfect fit of our bodies. We are tailor-made for one another. “When do you go back to New York?” I ask.