Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Q uiggs stirred, his senses awakening like pinpricks of light surfacing from dark water. A hand stroked his face and hair. Something warm, wet, velvety nuzzled his neck and face, and the rapid thud against his ear was someone’s frantic heartbeat. His name was whimpered over and over, pulling him back whenever he tried to sink into a numbing sleep to escape a pounding headache.
The blue and white pinpricks of light connected to form Beau’s anxious face, shiny with tears. Quiggs lolled in his arms, thinking they were back in the academy and Beau had crawled into the bunk to soothe him after a nightmare. Only Beau was crying this time, not Quiggs. How odd. And Beau was bigger. The arms cradling him felt huge.
Why was Beau huge and crying? What was wrong? Quiggs tried to shut out the questions. Answers could wait. He wanted to sleep until the pounding stopped, but Beau cradled, licked, whimpered until Quiggs relented.
“Why’re you cryin’?” Quiggs’s tongue was thick and dry, the words slurred .
The licking stopped. The heartbeat raced faster. “Oh, my Quiggs, it is bad.”
“Don’ care. Lemme sleep.” He burrowed his cheek against Beau’s sweaty chest.
Beau shook him. “Max said you must not sleep.”
“Stop it. Head hurts.”
“Wake up. You must think a way out for us. Max explores, but this place has no way out.”
“Get out… same way got in. Lemme sleep.” He snuggled, drifting back to sleep.
The next time he woke up, Quiggs lay with his head on Max’s lap. Max wiped his face with a wet cloth.
“Quiggs, baby, wake up.” Max jiggled him. “You need water. I filled a canteen from the sink. Open up and drink.”
He was parched. Quiggs opened his mouth and sipped. He had no idea what-where-why , and his blurred vision couldn’t read Max’s face, but he heard the worried note in Max’s voice. The tepid water loosened his tongue. “Tastes funny.”
“It’s pure. Goes through some sort of filter from a sink in the bathroom facility.”
Quiggs didn’t care if it was from a toilet. He closed his eyes. His head still pounded. Maybe after a little more sleep…
Max drizzled water over his face. “Stay awake. Drink some more.”
“Whyz…” He licked his lips. “ Why is my head hurting?”
“You bumped it on the raft when you fell overboard.”
Quiggs sipped more water. His vision sharpened, and Max came into focus, a frown pulling his eyebrows into a sharp V. Beau had held him earlier, his friend agitated and licking him. “Where’s Beau?”
“His turn to shower while I guard you.”
“Beau hates showers. ”
“Come on. Focus for me. It’s almost nightfall. A spinner knocked you overboard this morning, and three ferals pulled you onto the bank. Beau saved you from having your neck broken. I leaped to the bank, thinking Beau and I could fight three ferals. Only more came out of the vines.”
“Did I land balls-first?” When he shifted his cramped legs, his balls ached worse than his head.
“The females have been squeezing your cock and balls. The scent of my seed on your skin confuses them. You smell like a male with feral blood worthy of mating, but your cock is human.”
Quiggs stared up, confused by the number of suns shining down. The glare eased, and the suns became light globes. Lots of light globes way, way up on a vast ceiling. “Where are we?”
“We’re trapped on the ground floor of a bunker. We need to find a way out as soon as possible.”
A bunker this size was an exciting find. Why was it important to get out? He shook off the cobwebs, eager to explore. “What’s in here?”
“Us… and about 140 female ferals entering a breeding heat.”
Quiggs snapped into focus. “We gotta get out of here!” He struggled to sit up, and his bare arm brushed a warm, metallic wall. Bunkers had cold stone walls. He ran his fingertips over the slick surface. They tingled, and the smell grated his nostrils like greasy woodsmoke.
“Don’t sniff it!” An oily sheen covered Max’s face, throat, and arms. He wiped Quiggs’s nose and hand before wetting another cloth to clean himself. The cloths apparently came from Quiggs’s nightshirt, which had a shortened, ragged hem and was missing both sleeves. “The females secrete a sticky oil when they enter a breeding heat. It saturates the air and condenses on a male’s skin. If Beau and I don’t take showers every hour, it’ll steal our sanity and turn us into fucking machines. You’re human and can resist longer. Eventually, you’ll surrender.”
Quiggs closed his eyes, remembering the blue metal valve from a raid. “I thought the breeding den they found was the lost engineering room.”
“No sign of it. This bunker has twenty flights of stairs. The other walls are just gray opaque glass without markings. There are no doors anywhere except for an L-shaped entry to the bathroom facility.”
He squinted across the room and saw stairs. “Why can’t we climb those stairs out?”
Max pushed his chin up. “Look higher.”
“Oh.” Two sections of stairs were missing: one in the middle, one near the top.
“The only way in or out is that stairway.”
“I’m not scared of heights. Haul me up the gaps with the same line used to lower me?”
“No line. I threw you down. Beau caught you. Beau threw you. I caught you.”
Okay. He’d have pissed himself. “Gaps are too wide. You aren’t strong enough to throw me against the gravity. You’ll need a line to haul me up.”
“The females won’t let Beau or I near the stairs. Find another way out.”
Quiggs craned his neck. “From its size, this place looks like a massive storage room for construction materials for when the colonists left the shelter and built the Triangle. The colonists would need a mechanical lift to transport orders and workers.”
“What does a lift look like?”
“An empty room with some sort of operating panel to move it.”
Max waved a hand. “Where?”
Quiggs focused through his pounding headache. “Looking at the gaps in the stairs makes me think the glass walls are a lockdown activated during an attack. There is no way in or out but the stairs.” His knees wobbled when he stood. He was doomed, but Beau and Max could leap those gaps.
Beau joined them, his skin glistening from the shower. His pants clung to the sculpted buttocks and thighs of a desirable male, and scratches covered his bare chest and arms. “My Quiggs, you are awake!”
“Why are you scratched?”
“A female marks me to show she will fight to win my seed.”
Quiggs teased, “No scratches on you, Max?”
Max lifted the back of his navy tee. He was as marked as one of Quiggs’s configuration slates.
Quiggs was so fucked. He only had a bump on the head. “Promise me when the fighting breaks out, you two will use the distraction and save yourselves. Leave me behind.”
Beau hugged him. “No! They will not kill you swiftly if we escape and anger them.”
“The stairs are the only way out.”
“No. You are smart. You will find another way out.” Beau set him down. “What kind of place is this, my Quiggs?”
“The tomes described metal walls enclosing the shelter of our ancestors. Maybe this bunker is attached to the shelter.” He pressed an ear to the wall. “Listen for machinery.”
Beau pressed an ear to the wall, then pulled away with a yelp, tugging his earlobe. “Something bit me.” A drop of blood hung off the lobe.
Quiggs hoped there were no boiler ancestors nesting here. He didn’t see anything crawling on the surface
“Do not show fear.” Max’s voice was low and tense.
Quiggs turned around slowly. A female loomed in front of him.
Fear was hardly adequate to describe his first encounter with a live feral. Vines were the bane of the territory, but they didn’t eat you. Ferals had killed his parents, the tragedy stunting his puberty. If Beau and Max hadn’t flanked him with a grip on each arm, Quiggs would have collapsed.
Easily seven feet tall, the female had a lean, muscular frame, her firm, tawny skin naked but for a triangular scrap of hide tied around her waist to cover her plumbing. Her hips were spare, her legs sinewy, and her shoulders broader than Beau’s, her nose wider and flatter. Her eyes were green and tilted up.
The expressive face and high flat forehead marked her as an advanced species.
This female was not a beast who survived by instinct. She had inherited the capacity to think. As Quiggs studied her, she rumbled low in her throat.
“Do not look her in the eye,” Beau warned.
Quiggs bowed his head and saw her elongated feet displaying black-tipped claws. One swipe would eviscerate him. When he showed submission, she sheathed her claws. He was awake, and she was curious. She wrapped a hand around his bicep, small enough so her thumb touched her little finger. She gripped his chin and turned his face left, then right. She thumped the tender knot on his head. The pain buckled Quiggs’s legs, but he didn’t cry out.
Beau hissed his displeasure at the rough pawing, and she stepped back with a human shrug.
Young females with flushed high-pointed breasts and prominent fangs took turns examining Quiggs. They exchanged a series of harsh consonants combined with chittering and chuff sounds. He didn’t need to speak feral to understand they wouldn’t breed with him if he were the last male in the territory and their hindquarters were afire.
“There must have been a famine or a quake. Or shortage of males. Something tragic to cause this many exiled,” Max observed.
“The four oldest females are grandmothers experienced with delivering young,” Beau said. “The rest are young females entering their first breeding cycle at the same time. They must have chosen exile rather than fight for a cave. The grandmothers accompanied them rather than face a harvest of the elderly.”
“But that’s unnatural!” Quiggs cried.
“It is their way for centuries. Like the laws of the Ruling Mothers.”
A young female shouldered her way through and offered Beau a strip of bloody meat. He turned his face away, and she hissed at the rejection.
“Um… Beau… if you’re hungry… it’s not like you haven’t eaten raw goat before,” Quiggs reminded him.
“It is not goat, my Quiggs.”
Quiggs stopped thinking and put up a hedge around his head. Tall, thick, studded with thorns.
A second female stepped forward with a strip of meat. The female had rolled hanks of her dirty brown hair around small bones to frame her long triangular face. When Beau grunted acceptance and stuffed the dripping strip in his mouth, she cut her eyes in victory at the rejected female. He swallowed after a few chews and wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand.
Quiggs shuddered with revulsion.
“This meat is goat,” Beau said quietly.
As the females competed with each other to feed Beau and Max, squabbling broke out. The two men clamped their mouths shut when the wrong meat was thrust at them. Max held his displayed claws over his mouth, his face ill, when the rejected females pinned him to the wall, determined he accept their offerings.
The four grandmothers swatted them away. They hissed, and every young one stepped back a respectful distance. The old ones tore open leather meal pouches carried by herders and divided the contents among the strongest females, the ones likely to win breeding rights. One by one, those selected females approached Beau and Max and politely fed the men chewy nut bars and thick but moldy cheese sandwiches. A female unable to get near Max or Beau switched tactics and fed her handful to Quiggs. Her clever trick earned extra ogling from Max and Beau, and the rest followed suit, fawning over Quiggs, then cutting their eyes at the worthy males.
After feeding the men, the females butchered goats and fed themselves, separating into smaller groups which Beau said were alliances before the fighting.
The meat and marrow consumed, the females busied themselves forming leafy pallets out of vines. Two grandmothers fashioned pallets for Beau and Max, ignoring Quiggs. The other grandmothers patrolled the floor for females bedding down too near the men. Satisfied by the sleeping arrangements, the grandmothers retired to pallets by the stairs.
Max tugged Quiggs onto his pallet. “Sleep with me. Beau has the first watch.”
Quiggs lay with his back against the wall, spooning Max. “Won’t my sleeping on the same pallet with you make them jealous?”
Beau placed his pallet beside them and sat up for the first watch. “Worthy males use smaller males for sex. A male cannot rut with a female except when chosen during a breeding heat.”
Quiggs sputtered at the insult.
Max reached a hand behind to stroke the curve of Quiggs’s hip. “The females will not expect us to have sex tonight. You are hurt. But tomorrow we must prove we are worthy males with needs.”
Quiggs thunked Max’s back. “Forget it. You couldn’t find my dick with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers.”
Beau chortled.
The globes gradually dimmed to a soft red glow. A thousand years, ago this dimming indicated nightfall and time for workers to retire. How had the lighting remained functional for centuries?
As he spooned Max’s hard body, Quiggs thought he saw a halo of shimmery blue insects diving at Beau. He lifted on his elbow for a closer view, and the halo vanished. Beau sat undisturbed. Max was already softly snoring. Quiggs stared another minute, then settled back, thinking his vision quirky from the bump on his head.