Violet Eyes (16 page)

“You got some?” Her voice betrayed her excitement, and she dropped to her knees next to him, anxious to see.

Nate nodded. “For medicinal purposes only.” He licked the edge of the rolling paper, and then put the joint to his lips. A moment later, the flash of a flame was replaced with the warm orange glow of the marijuana slowly burning. Nate took two puffs and then held it out to Tori. She settled with her back against a log and inhaled, holding it in as long as she could before releasing a cloud of sweetly acrid smoke to the sky. She passed the joint back to Nate and sighed. “I think I could lie here like this forever.”

“Nah,” he said gasping as he released the hit. “You’ll have the munchies in a couple hours.”

“I mean, it’s so pretty,” Tori said. “And peaceful. It’s like…nothing could be wrong here. It’s like a little heaven.”

“Mmmmm,” Nate said. He stubbed the joint out, and set it in a crack in the log. Then he put his arm around Tori, resting his hand on the bare skin just below her throat. “No, this is heaven,” he said, slipping his hand inside her shirt.

Instead of protesting, she cupped her hand on top of his, and held it there a second. Then she sat up, and pulled her shirt over her head so that he could see the bra.

“Sweet,” he said. Nate dragged her down again and kissed her, and she rolled closer. His mouth tasted a little sour, maybe from the pot, and so Tori moved her lips to his neck. She tugged at his shirt, and he sat up, flipping it over his head.

“Whoa,” she said, when she saw his chest. “You sure you don’t got the measles or something?”

“No,” Nate laughed. It’s the fuckin’ flies. I was out cutting the grass in my shorts the other day with my shirt off, and all of a sudden there was this…this cloud of flies around me. They kept stinging me or biting or whatever… When I went in, I had these all over me. They actually look a little better today.”

“Do they hurt?”

He shook his head. “Just sting and itch a little.”

“So I shouldn’t touch you there too much.” Tori frowned. “You’re making this tough, you know. Your head hurts, your chest hurts…” She eyed his shorts. “Please tell me that…”

Nate grinned, and undid his belt. “That’s the one thing that doesn’t hurt. Though it does ache a little. But that’s only cuz it misses you.”

Tori grinned, and pulled his khaki shorts down, followed instantly by a gray pair of Hanes. Nate’s cock bobbed half erect at her face, and she took it with one hand and held it firmly. Then with a pink fingernail, she traced the deep purple ridge at the base of its head. Nate’s breathing suddenly got rough.

“Wait,” he said. “You still have too many clothes on.”

“I can do this fully dressed,” she said looking at him with one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, but it’s better if you’re not,” he said. His voice came out a little breathy as she rubbed the tip of his cock with the ball of her thumb. Then she laughed and released him.

“Oh, okay.” Tori hadn’t worn this pair of underwear to stay dressed. She stood and shucked her jeans off and did a little pirouette before him, showing off the soft curves of her ass that the g-string left unprotected, before kneeling down again. Then she put her lips on his cock, and took him slowly, teasingly, into her mouth. She loved this part the most. She could feel his anxiousness mounting. She may have been on her knees, but the control was all hers. He would beg for it right now if she wanted to make him. Now she traced his head with her tongue, and then his hand was on the back of her head, urging her to take him deeper.

Tori sucked him harder, letting her teeth graze the spots she knew were sensitive. She’d only given her first blowjob last year, but since then? She couldn’t get enough of it. There was something about having a guy totally at your mercy like that. She’d always liked to suck on things—candy, suckers, pen caps—but this? It gave her power to give a boy pleasure. And she loved giving Nate pleasure. His face looked so adorable when he got close…

She looked up and Nate was holding a hand to his head again, eyes closed. She slowed down and started to pull back, when his eyes opened. “Don’t stop,” he said with a harsh gasp. “Oh please don’t…”

This was feeling all weird, not like usual at all. He looked more like he was in pain than enjoying what she was doing. But Tori slipped his wet dick back into her mouth and sucked hard, willing him to come before his headache ruined it. She bobbed it back and forth in her mouth, and ran her hands up the backs of his thighs.

Nate was making tight, little mewling sounds now, and she knew he must be close. Then, as she slid her hand between his thighs and cupped him, she felt his balls contract, and she readied herself for that final push…

It hit her mouth in a warm, salty rush. Normally, that moment was sexy and comforting to her, though kind of disgusting, when she thought about it afterwards. But this time, as Nate’s sperm hit her tongue, she heard him cry out loudly, as if in pain rather than pleasure. And the taste of vinegar peppered in rancid ashes suddenly registered on her tongue. His load in her mouth not only tasted bad, it felt strange, almost as if it were full of tiny flecks of gravel or…

“Ouch,” she cried as she jerked back from his cock. “Oww!” she said again. Something was pinching her tongue. She spit his cum to the ground, as her tongue suddenly lit up with a dozen separate pains. She stuck it out and could see at the base of her vision that there were black shapes stuck to the tip. They moved as she watched, eight tiny legs creeping across her taste buds like some hideous cum crabs. Tori screamed, for a second, but then realized that she needed to get them
out
of her mouth, and screaming was only going to let them crawl down her throat. With her fingers, she scraped them off, in between spitting again and again. Her stomach was threatening to heave, but she was still trying to fathom what had just happened. Nate had just come…bugs? In her mouth?

She stared at the milky gob on the ground and saw it churning with tiny black legs, and the occasional flash of a purple streak.

What the…

She looked up just in time to see Nate topple over, still holding his head. As he hit the ground, he let out one jagged howl, and then was silent.

“Nate!” she cried. For a moment she forgot the taste in her mouth and grabbed for his hand. He didn’t respond. His body was limp, and his eyes closed. She slipped an arm behind his head and levered his head onto the log. The tiny spiders were crawling out of his limp penis now, and disappearing into his dark thatch of pubic hair. The light was almost gone, but when she leaned closer, she could see that there were spiders crawling in the hair on his head too. One skittered about near the bottom of his right eye, and she brushed it off, shrieking as she touched the hard shell of its abdomen.

Nate didn’t move. He didn’t answer her when she slapped his face and called his name, begging him to wake up.

She wanted to run, but she couldn’t just leave him like this. What was happening here?
Jesus
! For a split second, she wondered if they’d gotten some bad grass, and she was hallucinating. Didn’t they say when you tripped bad, your skin crawled, like you were covered in bugs? She had felt the wave of “relax” hit her fast with this joint. And even now…time seemed to slip for a second, and then she was looking at Nate from a different angle. She could see that there were spiders streaming from his ear. They ran in single file down his shoulder and across the bites on his chest. Some of them reached the grass and her feet. They crawled up her feet. Tiny bites freckled her ankles and calves but as soon as she slapped some away, more took their place.

“Nate!” she screamed again and again, rubbing the spiders off her legs. She slapped his face. “Wake up, damn it!”

His body shuddered. One eyelid lifted, and a word croaked out of his throat.

“Help,” he said.

And then a piece of his eyeball seemed to just…cave inward. One minute his pupil was locked on hers, and then all of a sudden, it imploded. As it did, a stream of black spiders with violet slashes on their backs ran out from the depths of his head, and across his face.

That did it for Tori. She screamed and leapt to her feet. She didn’t even pick up her clothes, she couldn’t think of anything but to get away from this…this…horror.

She ran back the way they’d come, dashing across the small clearing to the rough path, but she didn’t get very far down it before she had to stop, panicked or not. She couldn’t run because she couldn’t see a blessed thing. Not only had she left her clothes, she’d left the flashlight—and it was pitch-black here.

Her feet kept getting pierced by sharp sticks and pine needles. And then her calves were getting pinched. And her back. And her shoulders. She slapped at the things that bit her, but whenever she felt one spider crush against her skin, another bite needled her from someplace else.

Tori crept forward, testing the ground ahead with her toes before committing to a step. Finally, she stepped out into another tiny clearing between trees and finally caught enough moonlight to see again.

Part of her wished that she hadn’t.

Because she saw that her body was crawling with dark shapes. All of them biting. A thousand mosquito bites, a thousand fire ant bites, all at once. She screamed once more, in complete hysteria as they flowed up her neck to her cheeks in a wave. She slapped and slapped and danced around like a maniac, but the spiders didn’t let go.

In a few seconds, the venom joined the marijuana in her blood, and Tori was suddenly, horribly calm. The pain of the bites transmuted to a strange bliss, and she fell to the ground next to a tree. She reached out a hand to touch the rough bark. Maybe for a fleeting moment, she tried to pull herself back up.

And then the world for Tori slipped away until there was only a black void.

The spiders began to feed.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Thursday, May 16. 7:46 a.m.

On her way to work, Rachel saw someone posting a sign on the street lamppost at the end of her block. When she stopped at the next stop sign, she saw another one. And two blocks later, another one. She pulled up close and saw that the photocopied sign showed the picture of a dog in the center. She could make out three words:
Binky, Missing
and
Reward
.

Rachel shook her head. She hated seeing signs like those. They were like those pictures of kids you saw on the back of milk cartons (when you still actually bought a small carton, instead of a big plastic jug). She always turned the milk carton photos around. Looking at those grainy photos was just too depressing. Rachel couldn’t stand thinking of poor innocent kids—or puppies or cats or any living thing—lost and alone, wandering in search of home. The thought alone made her stomach tense up. Seeing those kinds of
Lost
signs always reminded her of how precious life was…and of how your situation could change for the worse in a heartbeat.

It was one thing to take control of your situation and change it, as she had done with Anders. It was hard to move to a new place and make a new life…but that was a conscious choice she had made. She wasn’t “lost”…if anything, she had finally found herself.

But a young kid or a pet that loses its way? They had no real understanding of the world. They hadn’t really made an informed choice to leave their comfortable bed behind to wander alone in the swamps. They couldn’t open a smart phone and do a Google Maps search with directions to find the way back home.

They were at the mercy of whoever, or whatever, happened upon them.

Rachel thought of Eric and Feral, and felt an overpowering need to turn around, go home, and hug them close.

Sadly, while as an adult you might have the ability to go where you wanted, the reality was that most times, you couldn’t. Rachel swallowed the emotions and continued driving to work. If she lost her job for showing up late, or not at all, Eric and Feral would have almost as much of a problem as if they were lost on their own.

Because she wouldn’t be able to keep a roof over their heads or food in their bellies.

The day went predictably slow. Rachel envied those stay-at-home moms who got to take their kids to school and then returned home to do housework. Sure, they had a hard job. Probably harder than the office work she was doing. But they did, to some extent, make their own schedules and could “go to work” in their sweatpants and T-shirts. And if they didn’t feel like cleaning the house or doing the dishes that day…they could blow it off. And not get fired.

Rachel couldn’t blow any of her day job’s tasks off. And she pretty much hated all of them. “But that’s why they call it work,” she reminded herself.

But a single woman who worked? She had to work two jobs. She had to be gone eight or nine hours a day doing someone else’s menial labor, and then come home and still manage to do all her own housework too. No relaxing time for her; she almost never had an hour or two to herself.

She thought back to the
Lost
signs. Maybe it would be better to be lost, she mused, as she pulled her car into the parking lot. And then chided herself.
Quit the crabbing and go to work!
She laughed to herself.
At least you have a job.

The one bright spot of the day was when Terry called and offered to take her to lunch. She accepted almost before he finished asking. They wouldn’t have much time together, but she looked forward to seeing him again, even if it only for an hour. He picked her up in his park ranger truck and drove a couple blocks down Central Avenue to Johnny’s Beef & Reef. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of fried fast food joint tucked between a pawn shop and a hair salon in a strip mall. People didn’t go there for the atmosphere, but the burgers and fries were pretty good. Rachel hadn’t braved the “reef” side of the menu yet.

“So, who is minding the Everglades while you’re here stuffing your face?” she asked sweetly after they’d sat down at a tiny red-and-white-checked table.

Terry shrugged. “Sometimes the wildlife can take care of itself without my help. And any women who fall down on the trail while jogging? Well, they’ll just be waiting there for a while, I guess. Everyone’s entitled to a lunch break. And, you know, it’s pretty rare that I need to be jogging down the trails to rescue a fair jogger in need.”