Chapter 16
CUCKOO
Taylor
As they navigated between the perfectly manicured lawns and overly complicated hanging baskets of East Dingly, Taylor found that he couldn’t stop looking at Johnny.
His stomach was doing flips every time their eyes met, and he was very, very conscious of how Johnny’s combat trousers pulled across his crotch every time he pressed down on the clutch.
“Thank God,” Taylor muttered when they finally found their way to Clydesdale Close.
Like all of the town’s residential clusters, this one was named after something specific.
In this case, horses. Taylor thought it would have been infinitely more funny if they’d have named the roads something like Brittneigh Spurs Street, but sadly they went for Friesian Fields, Mustang Mount and Lipizzan Lane.
Spoilsports.
“She’s inside,” said a concerned looking lady, her wrinkled fingers turning white as she gripped her picket fence.
“Jill, her name is. Well, actually her real name is Mathilda, but she doesn’t like that.
” The old woman leant forwards, her silver perm swaying in the breeze. “Says it reminds her of the war.”
Taylor had no idea what that meant, but he nodded and glanced at Johnny. “Oookay. Got it.”
Wandering up the disturbingly symmetrical flag stones, Taylor paused when a bright flash of white under one of the front windows caught his eye.
“Huh…” he murmured, cutting off from the path and following a flowerbed around the front of the house.
He accidentally flattened several of Jill’s pansies under his boots, coming to a stop when he found what he was looking for.
A spilled tub of talcum powder. Nothing particularly odd about it, but he was pretty certain it shouldn’t have been in the flower bed.
He stared at it for a few seconds before the front door creaked and Johnny said, “It’s open.” Taylor watched as he pushed it with a finger and stuck his head through the gap. “Jill?”
Taylor re-trampled Jill’s pansies and fell back in line with Johnny. “Jill?” Taylor called.
Silence.
“Hellooo, Jill. Can we come in, love?” Taylor called again before pushing open the door the rest of the way.
The house was in darkness and all the curtains were drawn, despite it being midmorning. It was the very definition of an old white lady’s house, with the randomly placed doilies and obnoxious china cats.
The cats were staring at him from a shelf in the hall, with their slitty green eyes, pointy golden whiskers and demented smiles.
Johnny was the religious one, but Taylor was pretty certain that if anything had been spawned from the pits of hell it was definitely those fucking cats.
Taylor shuddered as he peered up the stairs. “Jill, we’re in your hallway!” he called in a sing-song voice that was meant to sound friendly, but came out like a crazy serial killer. “Jill?”
“Hello!”
Taylor screamed.
Ruggedly.
And definitely not like a six-year-old girl.
“J-Jill!” he said, throwing out both hands and screaming again when he realised his palms were cupping two very wrinkled boobs. He went to pull away but Jill grabbed him and held them there.
“Hello, gorgeous,” she said with a huge, denture-white smile. “Come to help a girl out?”
“Um… Hi… Jill…” he said, still trying to pull away, but the old girl had a grip like a vice. He could hear Johnny snorting as Jill began to pull him towards the stairs.
Jill’s head snapped round. “Two!” she said, letting go of one of Taylor’s hands and replacing it with Johnny’s. “There’s two of you!”
“Oh, I… er…” Johnny began, trying to back away.
“Come, come,” she said, dragging them up the first few steps.
Their shoulders knocked, bodies squashed together as Johnny flattened himself to the wall and Taylor had a mobility rail jabbing him in the left butt cheek.
As Jill gripped his hand harder, Taylor realised her skin was red hot, and she smelled like maple syrup.
“Jill, I think we’d better—”
“Get upstairs? Oh yes, I’d say so.” And it was quite clear that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“We aren’t doing this again,” Taylor muttered, hip and elbow smacking the banister as Johnny’s stab vest left drag marks along the textured wallpaper. “We said no more threesomes. Not even with the elderly.”
“I don’t think Jill is giving us much choice,” Johnny replied. “Do you smell that?”
Taylor nodded. “Sweet, right? It’s the same as—”
“This way!” Jill said, tugging them upstairs with more urgency.
There was a shelf on the landing with another row of those fucking cats. Taylor shivered and said, “She’s sick. I think maybe an infection? Oh shit, what if it’s sepsis? Old people get sepsis all the time, right?”
“Here we are!” Jill proclaimed, letting them go and throwing her arms in the air.
What they were presented with was a stockpile of…
something—clothes and empty food packets scattered all around the medical grade bed.
There were tubes and wires and some kind of dusty monitoring equipment that Taylor assumed must have been left by her previous mate, because Jill was definitely not bed bound.
“I’ve got us plenty of rations, so no need to leave the bunker,” she said, the smile on her face growing wide and dreamy. “Come on, the nest is ready.”
Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
Johnny threw up his hands, taking a step back. “Jill, you’re a beta. You don’t make nests.”
Jill looked suddenly heartbroken as her eyes began to water. “B-but I’ve made one for you.”
Taylor scowled at Johnny, then looked back at Jill with a sympathetic expression. “Um, thanks ever so much,” he said, slipping his hand out of her grip as Johnny backed all the way to the end of the landing. “But I’m afraid we’ve got to get back to the Luftwaffe.”
“The Luftwaffe?” she said, looking confused.
“That was Germans,” Johnny hissed.
“Shit…” Taylor mumbled, trying his best to think back to GCSE history. “W-well, Jill, I’m afraid the bunker is compromised. They’re evacuating everyone and we don’t want to miss the buggy.”
His eyes flicked to Johnny, who gave him a subtle thumbs up.
Jill gasped. “Operation Pied Piper?”
Taylor’s mouth opened and closed. “Er, yeah. That’s right. Operation Pied… Piper.”
“Right you are!” she said, straightening and tipping them a salute.
Johnny dipped into a spare bedroom and pulled a blanket from the back of a reclining chair. He wrapped it around her three times, making her into a cosy, heart covered burrito. Patting her shoulders, he lead her towards the stairs
“What the fuck?” Taylor whispered.
“Just go with it,” Johnny replied, squeezing his shoulder from behind. “Just get her in the car and we’ll take her to the hospital.”
“Right.”
They somehow navigated the stairs and hallway, with Jill swaying unsteadily between them. Johnny opened the door as Taylor led her outside.
People were staring and an old man with a Zimmer laughed as they guided her to the car. Hot anger flared in Taylor’s gut. “This could be you, Keith!”
He didn’t know if the man’s name was Keith, but he’d met so many Keiths over the last couple of weeks that it was a fair guess. The man that could have been Keith ducked his head and carried on walking.
Johnny helped Jill into the back of the car, gently holding her arms as she tried to break out of her snuggly restraints. She tried to flash them her tits again, but Taylor gently assured her that they were quite alright.
“Thanks, Jill,” he said, sinking into the front passenger seat. “But why don’t we save that until the threat has cleared, hm?”
She winked and gave him a devilish smile.
“I’ll lock up,” Johnny said, closing Jill’s door. “Don’t let her shit on the seat. Sarge will kill us if we write off another car.”
Taylor slouched, watching through the window as Johnny wandered back up the path. He heard Jill shuffle under the blanket, and he ignored the way her withered fingers reached around the headrest and pawed at his cropped beard.
Okay, he wasn’t ignoring it. He actually kind of liked it because her fingertips were all rough and cold and it felt pretty good across his aching jaw.
Sighing, he reached into his front pocket. “Sweets?” he said, holding out a fun sized pack of jelly babies to Jill.
“Oh, yes please!” she said, snatching the packet out of his hands like a greedy little gremlin.
He listened to her chew, focusing on the sound of her false teeth and not the ball of anxious energy rippling in his intestines.
Well, hadn’t life just thrown him through a fucking loop?
After the threesome, Taylor had fully expected Johnny to kick him out of the pack, or at least out of the house, but no.
He’d climbed all over him, said he wanted to knot him, and shit if that hadn’t made his dick swell and his stomach do loop-de-loops.
It shouldn’t have. But it had.
He was about to close his eyes and wait for Johnny to return when there came a high-pitched whistle from the front of Jill’s house. When Taylor looked across the lawn he saw Johnny waving him over. Frowning, Taylor got out of the car, locked the rear doors and padded back up the garden path.
“You need to see this,” Johnny said, leading him back inside.
“If it’s a sex dungeon, I don’t think I wanna know, JP.”
Johnny shook his head. “It’s worse.”
They made their way back through the house, the horrific china cats somehow looking worse now that the lights were on.
“In here,” Johnny said, leading Taylor through a white PVC door into a little wooden lean-to at the side of the house.
Taylor sniffed, recoiling at the pungent scent of vinegar mixed with ammonia and… talcum powder. “Oh shit,” he said, eyes darting over the metal shelving unit and the massive blocks of silvery white powder stacked across them.