Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

THE FIRST TIME ^{K. W. JETER}

HIS FATHER AND HIS uncle decided it was about time. Time for him to come along. They went down there on a regular basis, with their buddies, all of them laughing and drinking beer right in the car, having a good time even before they got there. When they left the house, laying a patch of rubber out by the curb, he’d lie on his bed upstairs and think about them—at least for a little while, till he fell asleep—think about the car heading out on the long straight road, where there was nothing on either side except the bare rock and dirt and the dried-brown scrubby brush. With a cloud of dust rolling up behind them, his uncle Tommy could just floor it, one-handing the steering wheel, with nothing to do but keep it on the dotted line all the way down there. He lay with the side of his face pressed into the pillow, and thought of them driving, making good time, hour after hour, tossing the empties out the window, laughing and talking about mysterious things, things you only had to say the name of and everybody knew what you were talking about, without another word being said. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car would smell like beer and sweat, six guys together, one of them right off his shift at the place where they made the cinder blocks, the fine gray dust on his hands and matted in the dark black hair of his forearms. Driving and laughing all the way, until the bright lights came into view—he didn’t know what happened after that. He closed his eyes and didn’t see anything.

And when they got back—they always got back late at night, so even though they’d been, gone nearly the whole weekend, and he’d gotten up and watched television and listened to his mom talking to her friends on the phone, and had something to eat and stuff like that, when his father and his uncle and their buddies got back, the noise of the car pulling up, with them still talking and laughing, but different now, slower and lower-pitched and satisfied—it was like it woke him up from the same sleep he’d fallen into when they’d left. All the other stuff was just what he’d been dreaming.

“You wanna come along?” His father had asked him, turning away from the TV. Just like that, no big deal, like asking him to fetch another beer from the fridge. “Me and Tommy and the guys—we’re gonna go down there and see what’s happening. Have a little fun.”

He hadn’t said anything back for a little while, but had just stared at the TV, the colors fluttering against the walls of the darkened room. His father hadn’t had to say anything more than down there—he knew where that meant. A little knot, one he always had in his stomach, tightened and drew down something in his throat.

“Sure,” he’d finally mumbled. The string with the knot in it looped down lower in his gut. His father just grunted and went on watching the TV.

He figured they’d decided it was time because he’d finally started high school. More than that, he’d just about finished his first year and had managed to stay out of whatever trouble his older brother had gotten into back then, finally causing him to drop out and go into the army and then god knew what—nobody had heard from his brother in a long time. So maybe it was as some kind of reward, for doing good, that they were going to take him along with them.

He didn’t see what was so hard about it, about school. What made it worth a reward. All you had to do was keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself. And there was stuff to do that got you through the day: he was in the band, and that was okay. He played the baritone sax—it was pretty easy because they never got any real melodies to play, you just had to fart around in the background with everybody else. Where he sat was right in front of the trombone section, which was all older guys; he could hear them talking, making bets about which of the freshman girls would be the next to start shaving her legs. Plus they had a lot of jokes about the funny way flute players made their mouths go when they were playing. Would they still look that funny way when they had something else in their mouths? It embarrassed him because the flute players were right across from the sax section, and he could see the one he’d already been dating a couple of times.

One time, when they’d been alone, she’d given him a piece of paper that she’d had folded up in the back pocket of her jeans. The paper had gotten shaped round, the same shape as her butt, and he’d felt funny taking it and unfolding it. The paper was a mimeographed diagram that her minister at her Episcopalian youth group had given her and the rest of the girls in the group. It showed what parts of their bodies they could let a boy touch, at what stage. You had to be engaged, with a ring and everything, before you could unhook her bra. He’d kept the piece of paper, tucked in one of his books at home. In a way, it’d been kind of a relief, just to know what was expected of him.

It was what worried him about going down there, with his father and his uncle and the other guys—he didn’t know what he was supposed to do when they got there. He lay awake the night before, wondering. He turned on the light and got out the piece of paper the girl who played the flute had given him, and looked at the dotted lines that made a sort of zone between the diagram’s throat and navel, and another zone below that, that looked like a pair of underpants or the bottom half of a girl’s two-piece swimsuit. Then he folded the paper back up and stuck it in the book where he kept it. He didn’t think the diagram was going to do him any good where he was going.

“All right—let’s get this show on the road.” His uncle Tommy leaned out of the driver’s-side window and slapped the door’s metal. They always went down there in Tommy’s car because it was the biggest, an old Dodge that wallowed like a boat even on the straightaways. The other guys chipped in for the gas. “Come on—let’s move on out.” Tommy’s big yellow grin was even looser; he’d already gotten into the six-pack stowed down on the floor.

For a moment, he thought they’d all forgotten about taking him along. There were already five guys in the car when it’d pulled up in front of the house, and his father would make the sixth. He stood on the porch, feeling a secret hope work at the knot in his gut.

“Aw, man—what the hell were you guys thinking of?” The voice of one of the guys in the car floated out, across the warm evening air. It was Bud, the one who worked at the cinder block factory. “There’s no way you can stick seven of us in here, and then drive all the way down there.”

The guy next to Bud, in the middle of the backseat, laughed. “Well, hell—maybe you can just sit on my lap, then.”

“Yeah, well, you can just sit on this.” Bud gave him the finger, then drained the last from a can of beer and dropped it onto the curb. Bud pushed the door open and got out. “You guys just have a fine old time without me. I got some other shit to take care of.”

Tommy’s grin grew wider. “Ol’ Bud’s feeling his age. Since that little sweetheart last time fucked up his back for him.”

“Your ass.”

From the porch, he watched Bud walking away, the blue glow of the streetlights making the cinder block dust on Bud’s workshirt go all silver. He couldn’t tell if Bud had been really mad—maybe about him coming along and taking up space in the car—or if it was just part of the joke. A lot of the time he couldn’t tell whether his father and his buddies were joking or not.

“Come on—” His father had already gotten in the car, up front, elbow hanging over the sill of the door. “What’re you waiting for?”

He slid in the back. The seat had dust from Bud’s shirt on it, higher up than his own shoulders. “Here we go,” said his father, as his head rocked back into the cinder block dust. The guy next to him, his father’s buddy, peeled a beer off a six-pack and handed it to him. He held it without opening it, letting the cold seep into his hands as the streets pivoted around and swung behind the car, until they were past the last streetlight and onto the straight road heading for the southern hills.

All the way down there, they talked about baseball. Or football, shouting over the radio station that Tommy had turned up loud. He didn’t listen to them, but leaned his shoulder against the door, gulping breath out of the wind, his face stung red. For a long while he thought there was something running alongside the car, a dog or something, but faster than a dog could run, because his uncle Tommy had the car easily wound up to over seventy. The dog, or whatever it was, loped in the shadows at the side of the road, a big grin like Tommy’s across its muzzle, its bright spark eyes looking right at him. But when another car came along, going the other way, the headlights making a quick scoop over the road, the dog wasn’t there. Just the rocks and brush zooming by, falling back into the dark behind them. He pushed his face farther out into the wind, eyes squinted, the roar swallowing up the voices inside the car. The dog’s yellow eyes danced like coins out there, keeping alongside and smiling at him.

“All right—we have uh-rived.” His uncle Tommy beat an empty beer can against the curve of the steering wheel, then pitched it outside.

He looked up ahead, craning his neck to see around his father in the front seat. He could see a bridge, with lights strung up along it. And more lights beyond it, the town on the other side. He dropped back in his seat, combing his hair down into place with his fingers.

The lights, when they got across the bridge, were like Christmas lights, strings of little colored bulbs laced over the doorways of the buildings and even across the street, dangling up above, pushing back the night sky. There were other lights, too, the kind you’d see anywhere, blinking arrows that pointed to one thing or another, big yellow squares with the plastic strips for the black letters to stick on, covered in chicken wire to keep people’s hands off.

Tommy let the car crawl along, inching through the traffic that had swallowed them up soon as they’d hit the town. So many other cars, all of them moving so slow, that people crossing the street, going from the lit-up doorways on one side to those on the other, just threaded their way through. Or if they were young guys, and the cars were bumper to bumper, they’d slap their hands down on a hood and a trunk lid and just vault over, with a little running step on the ridge of the bumpers halfway across, and just laughing and shouting to each other the whole time.

Even though it was so loud in the street—with all the car radios blaring away, with everybody’s windows rolled down, and the even louder music thumping out of the doorways—he felt a little drowsy somehow. He’d drunk the beer his father’s buddy had given him, and a couple more after that, and had gone on staring out at the dark rolling by the whole way down here. Now the street’s noise rolled over him like the slow waves at the ocean’s surface, far above him.

“Bail out, kid—let’s go!” The guy beside him, in the middle of the backseat, was pushing him in the arm. His head lolled for a moment, neck limp, before he snapped awake. He looked around and saw his father and his uncle and the other guys all getting out of the car. Rubbing his eyes, he pushed the door open and stumbled out.

He followed them up the alley where they’d parked, out toward the lights and noise rolling in the street. It wasn’t as bright and loud at this end; they’d left most of the action a couple of blocks back.

His father and his uncle were already down the street, laughing and swapping punches as they went, little boxing moves with feints and shuffles, like a couple of teenagers or something. His uncle Tommy was always carrying on, doing stuff like that, but he’d never seen his father so wild and happy. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders, and their faces and chests lit up red as they stepped into one of the doorways, his father sweeping back a curtain with his hand. The light that had spilled out into the street blinked away as the curtain fell back into place. He broke into a run to catch up with the others.

Some kind of a bar—that was what it looked like and smelled like, the smell of spilled beer and cigarette smoke that had soaked into everything and made the air a thick blue haze around the lights. The others were already sitting around a table, one of the booths at the side; they’d left room for him at the end, and he slid in beside his uncle Tommy.

The man came around from behind the bar with a tray of beers, squat brown bottles sweating through the crinkly foil labels. He didn’t know whether his father had already ordered, or whether the bartender already knew what they wanted, from all the times they’d been here before. He wasn’t sure he’d get served, but it didn’t seem to matter here how young he was; the bartender put a beer down in front of him, too. He took a pull at it as he looked around at the empty stage at one end of the room, with heavy red curtains draped around it and big PA speakers at the side. The other booths, and some of the tables in the middle, were crowded with bottles, men elbowing them aside as they leaned forward and talked, dropping the butts of their cigarettes into the empties.

Somebody poked him—it felt like a broom handle—and he looked around and saw a face grinning at him. A man short enough to look him straight in the eye where he sat; the grin split open to show brown teeth, except for two in front that were shining gold. The little man poked him again, with two metal tubes that had wires hooked to them, running back to a box that hung from a strap around the man’s neck.

“Yeah, yeah—just take ’em.” His father waggled a finger at the tubes, while digging with the other hand into his inside coat pocket. “Just hold on to ’em now. This is how they make you a man in these parts.” His father came up with a dollar bill from a roll in the coat pocket and handed it over to the little man.

The tubes were about the size of the inside of a toilet paper roll, but shiny, and hard and cold to the touch. He looked at them sitting in his hands, then glanced up when he saw the little man turning a crank at the side of the box hanging around his neck.

An electric shock jumped out of the tubes, stinging his palms. He dropped them and jerked away. He looked around and saw his father and his buddies all roaring with laughter. Right beside him, his uncle Tommy was slapping the table with one hand, turning red and choking on a swallow of beer.

“Here—give ’em here.” His father traded another dollar bill for the tubes, the wires dangling between the bottles as he took them from the little man. “Let ’er rip.”

The little man turned the crank on the box, digging into it to make it go round faster and faster. His father winced with the first surge, then squeezed the tubes harder, hands going white-knuckled, teeth gritting together, lips drawn back. The crank on the box went around in a blur, until his father’s hands flew open and the tubes clattered onto the table, knocking over one of the bottles. Beer foamed out and dribbled over the edge.

“Whoa! Jesus fucking Christ!” His father shook his hands, loose at the wrist. The guy sitting next over stuck out a palm and his father slapped it, grinning in triumph. The little man with the box did a kind of dance, laughing to show all the brown and gold teeth and pointing with a black-nailed finger. Then squatting down, the short legs bowing out, and cupping a hand to his crotch, acting like there was some cannonball-sized weight hanging there. The little man laughed and pointed to the man sitting in the booth again, then took another dollar bill and trotted away with the box and the tubes to another table.

He was looking at his father putting the roll of bills back into the coat pocket. His own hands still stung, and he wrapped them around the wet bottle in front of him to cool them.

“Yessir—that fucker’ll sober you right up.” His father signaled to the bartender. “I’m gonna need a couple more after that little bastard.”

Somebody came walking over to the booth, but it wasn’t the bartender. He looked up and saw one of the guys, one of his father’s buddies—the guy hadn’t been there the whole time they’d been messing around with the little man with the box.

“Lemme out.” His uncle Tommy nudged him. “I think it’s just about my turn.”

He didn’t know what his uncle meant, but he stood up and let Tommy slide out of the booth. The other guy took his place, sorting through the bottles on the table for the one that had been there before, that he hadn’t finished.

Before he sat back down, he watched his uncle Tommy walking across the bar, squeezing past the backs of the chairs circled around the tables. There was a door in the corner with one of those wordless signs, a stick figure to indicate the men’s room. But Tommy didn’t head off toward that. His uncle pulled back the curtain hiding a doorway off to the side and disappeared behind it. He sat back down, but kept looking over at the curtain as he sipped at the beer that had grown warm in his hands.

Then—he didn’t know how long it was—his uncle Tommy was back. Standing beside him, at the outside of the booth.

“Come on, fella—” Across the table, his father stabbed a thumb up in the air a couple of times. “Get up and let your old uncle siddown.”

His uncle smelled different, sweat and something else. He got up, stepping back a little bit—the scent curled in his nostrils like something from an animal—and let his uncle slide into the booth.

He sat back down. His uncle Tommy had a big grin on his face. Around the table, he saw a couple of the other guys give a slow wink to each other, then tilt their beers up again.

Tommy glanced sidelong at him, then leaned over the table and spewed out a mouthful of blood. Enough of it to swamp across the tabletop, knocking the empty bottles over in the flood.

And he wasn’t sitting in the booth then, next to his uncle. He’d jumped out of the booth, the way you would from the door of a rolling car; he stumbled and almost fell backward. Standing a couple of feet away, he listened to the men pounding the table and howling their laughter, louder than when the man with the box had shocked him.

“Tom, you shit-for-brains—” His father was red-faced, gasping for breath.

His uncle Tommy had a dribble of red going down his chin, like the finger of blood that had reached the edge of the table and dribbled over. Pretty drunk, his uncle smiled as he looked around the booth at the guys, pleased with the joke. His uncle turned and smiled at him, red seeping around the teeth in the sloppy grin.

The laughter dwindled away, the men shaking their heads and rubbing tears from the corners of their eyes. They all took long pulls at their beers. That was when he saw that there wasn’t any room in the booth for him. They’d all shifted a little bit and taken up all the room; his uncle was sitting right at the end where he’d been.

They didn’t say anything, but he knew what it meant. He turned around and looked across the bar, to the curtain that covered the doorway over there. It meant it was his turn now.

The woman ran her hand along the side of his neck. “You haven’t been around here before, have you?” She smiled at him. Really smiled, not like she was laughing at him.

“No—” He shook his head. Her hand felt cool against the heat that had come rushing up under his skin. He pointed back over his shoulder. “I came with my dad, and his friends.”

Her gaze moved past his eyes, up to where her fingers tangled around in his hair. “Uh-huh,” she said. “I know your daddy.”

She got up from the bed. He sat there watching her as she stood at a little shelf nailed to the wall. The shelf had a plastic-framed mirror propped up on it, and a towel and a bar of soap. She watched herself taking off her dangly earrings, gold ones, drawing the curved hooks out. She laid them down in front of the little mirror.

“Well, you don’t have to worry none.” She spoke to the mirror. “There’s always a first time. Then it’s easy after that.” She rubbed a smudge away from the corner of her eye. “You’ll see.”

When he’d pulled aside the curtain and stepped into the dark—away from the bar’s light, its noise of laughing and talking falling behind him—he hadn’t even been able to see where he was, until he’d felt the woman take his hand and lead him a little farther along, back to where the doors to a lot of little rooms were lit up by a bulb hanging from the hallway’s ceiling. One of the doors had opened and a man had come out and shoved past him in the narrow space, and he’d caught a whiff of the smell off the man, the same as had been on his uncle Tommy when he’d come back out to the booth.

When the woman had closed the door and come over to the bed to sit close by him, he’d held his breath for a moment, because he thought the scent would be on her too, that raw smell, like sweat, only sharper. But she smelled sweet, like something splashed on from a bottle, the kind women always had on their dressers. That made him realize that she was the first woman, the first female thing, he’d been near, for what seemed like days. All the way down here—in the car with his father and his uncle and their buddies, packed up tight with them as they’d gone barreling along in the night, and then crowded around the table in the booth, the same night rolling through the street outside, until their sweat was all he could smell, right down into his throat.

“Here—you don’t want to get that all mussed up.” The woman had on a white slip—it shone in the dim light as she came back toward the bed. “Let’s take it off.” She bent down, her dark hair brushing against his face, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

He felt cold, the sweat across his arms and shoulders chilling in the room’s air. The woman sat down and leaned back against the bed’s pillow, dropping his shirt to the floor. “Come a little closer.” She stretched out her arms toward him.

“You see… there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Her voice went down to a whisper, yet somehow it filled the little room; it ate up all the space, until there was just the bed and her on it.

“We’ll go real slow, so you won’t get scared.” She smiled at him, her hand tracing down his rib cage. She was a lot older than him; this close to her, he could see the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the skin that had gone soft and tissuey around the bone, dark underneath it. The sweet smell covered up something else; when he breathed her breath, it slid down his throat and stuck there.

“Look…” She took his hand and turned his arm around, the pale skin underneath showing. She drew a fingernail along the blue vein that ran down to the pulse ticking away in his wrist.

She dropped his hand and held out her own arm. For just a second—then she seemed to remember something. She lifted her hips to pull the slip up, then shimmied the rest of the way out of it like a quick snakeskin. She threw it on the floor with his shirt.

“Now look…” She traced the vein in her arm. Her fingernail left a long thin mark along it. She did it again, the mark going deeper. Then a dot of red welled up around her nail, in the middle of her forearm. She dug the nail in deeper, then peeled back the white skin, the line pulling open from the inside of her elbow to her wrist.

“Look,” she whispered again. She held the arm up to his face. The room was so small now, the ceiling pressing against his neck, that he couldn’t back away. “Look.” She held the long slit open, her fingers pulling the skin and flesh back. The red made a net over her hand, collecting in thicker lines that coursed to the point of her elbow and trickled off. A red pool had formed between her knee and his, where their weight pressed the mattress down low.

The blue line inside her arm was brighter now, revealed. “Go on,” she said. “Touch it.” She leaned forward, bringing her mouth close to his ear. “You have to.”

He reached out—slowly—and lay his fingertips on the blue line. For a moment he felt a shock, like the one the man in the bar had given him. But he didn’t draw his hand away from the slit the woman held open to him. Under his fingertips he felt the tremble of the blood inside.

Her eyelids had drawn down, so that she looked at him through her lashes. Smiling. “Don’t go…” He saw her tongue move across the edges of her teeth. “There’s more…”

She had to let go of the edges, to guide him. The skin and flesh slid against his fingers, under the ridge of his knuckles. He could still see inside the opening, past her hand and his.

She teased a white strand away from the bone. “Here…” She looped his fingers under the tendon. As his fingers curled around it, stretching and lifting it past the glistening muscle, the hand at the end of the arm, her hand, curled also. The fingers bent, holding nothing, a soft gesture, a caress.

He could barely breathe. When the air came into his throat, it was heavy with the woman’s sweet smell, and the other smell, the raw, sharper one that he’d caught off his uncle.

“See?” The woman bent her head low, looking up through her lashes into his eyes: Her breasts glowed with sweat. Her hair trailed across her open arm, the ends of the dark strands tangling in the blood. “See—it’s not so bad, is it?”

She wanted him to say no, she wanted him to say it was okay. She didn’t want him to be frightened. But he couldn’t say anything. The smell had become a taste lying on his tongue. He finally managed to shake his head.

Her smile was a little bit sad. “Okay, then.” She nodded slowly. “Come on.”

The hand at the end of the arm had squeezed into a fist, a small one because her hands were so small. The blood that had trickled down into her palm seeped out from between the fingers and thumb. With her other hand, she closed his fingers around the white tendon tugged up from inside. She closed her grip around his wrist and pulled, until the tendon snapped, both ends coming free from their anchor on the bone.

She made him lift his hand up, the ends of the tendon dangling from where it lay across his fingers. She had tilted her head back, the cords in her throat drawn tight.

“Come on…” She leaned back against the pillow. She pulled him toward her. One of her hands lay on the mattress, palm upward, open again, red welling up from the slit in her arm. With her other hand she guided his hand. His fingers made red smears across the curve of her rib cage. “Here…” She forced his fingertips underneath. “You have to push hard.” The skin parted and his fingers sank in, the thin bone of the rib sliding across the tips.

“That’s right…” She nodded as she whispered, eyes closed. “Now you’ve got it….”

Her hand slid down from his, down his wrist and trailing along his forearm. Not holding and guiding him any longer, but just touching him. He knew what she wanted him to do. His fingers curled around the rib, the blood streaming down to his elbow as the skin opened wider. He lifted and pulled, and the woman’s rib cage came up toward him, the ones higher snapping free from her breastbone, all of them grinding softly against the hinge of her spine.

His hand moved inside, the wing of her ribs spreading back. Her skin parted in a curve running up between her breasts. He could see everything now, the shapes that hung suspended in the red space, close to each other, like soft nestled stones. The shapes trembled as his hand moved between them, the webs of sinew stretching, then peeling open, the spongy tissue easing around his hand and forearm.

He reached up higher, his body above hers now, balancing his weight on his other hand hard against the mattress, deep in the red pool along her side. Her knees pressed into the points of his hips.

He felt it then, trembling against his palm. His hand closed around it, and he saw it in her face as he squeezed it tight into his fist.

The skin parted further, the red line dividing her throat, to the hinge of her jaw. She lifted herself up from the pillow, curling around him, the opening soft against his chest. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders to hold him closer to her.

She tilted her head back, pressing her throat to his mouth. He opened his mouth, and his mouth was full, choking him until he had to swallow. The heat streaming across his face and down his own throat pulsed with the trembling inside his fist.

He swallowed again now, faster, the red heat opening inside him.

It was lying on the bed, not moving. He stood there looking at it. He couldn’t even hear it breathing anymore. The only sound in the little room was a slow dripping from the edge of the mattress onto the floor.

He reached down, fingertip trembling, and touched its arm. Its hand lay open against the pillow, palm upward. Underneath the red, the flesh was white and cold. He touched the edge of the opening in its forearm. Already, the blue vein and the tendon had drawn back inside, almost hidden. The skin had started to close, the ends of the slit becoming a faint white line, that he couldn’t even feel, though he left a smeared fingerprint there. He pulled back his hand, then he turned away from the bed and stumbled out into the hallway with the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

They looked up and saw him as he walked across the bar. He didn’t push the empty chairs aside, but hit them with his legs, shoving his way past them.

His uncle Tommy scooted over, making room for him at the booth. He sat down hard, the back of his head striking the slick padding behind him.

They had all been laughing and talking just before, but they had gone quiet now. His father’s buddies fumbled with the bottles in front of them, not wanting to look at him.

His father dug out a handkerchief, a blue checked one. “Here—” A quiet voice, the softest he’d ever heard his father say anything. His father held out the handkerchief across the table. “Clean yourself up a little.”

He took the handkerchief. For a long time, he sat there and looked down at his hands and what was on them.

They were all laughing again, making noise to keep the dark pushed back. His father and his uncle and their buddies roared and shouted and pitched the empties out the windows. The car barreled along, cutting a straight line through the empty night. He laid his face into the wind. Out there, the dog ran at the edge of the darkness, its teeth bared, its eyes like bright heated coins. It ran over the stones and dry brush, keeping pace with the car, never falling behind, heading for the same destination.

The wind tore the tears from his eyes. The headlights swept across the road ahead, and he thought of the piece of paper folded in the book in his bedroom. The piece of paper meant nothing now, he could tear it into a million pieces. She’d know, too, the girl who played the flute and who’d given the piece of paper to him. She’d know when she saw him again, she’d know that things were different now, and they could never be the same again. They’d be different for her now, too. She’d know.

The tears striped his face, pushed by the wind. He wept in rage and shame at what had been stolen from him. Rage and shame that the woman down there, in the little room at the end of the street with all the lights, would be dead, would get to know over and over again what it was to die. That was what she’d stolen from him, from all of them.

He wept with rage and shame that now he was like them, he was one of them. He opened his mouth and let the wind hammer into his throat, to get out the stink and taste of his own sweat, which was just like theirs now.

The dog ran beside the car, laughing as he wept with rage and shame. Rage and shame at what he knew now, rage and shame that now he knew he’d never die.