Chapter 13 #2
Almost sobbing, she writhed and rotated her hips, seeking her release, rising up and down and throwing her head back. When her orgasm hit, she fell forward onto him, gasping, and took his earlobe between her teeth.
He shuddered. “Yes. So good.”
When she’d recovered, Allie slid from his lap and wasted no time freeing him from his pants. He pulled a condom from his pocket, and she plucked it from his fingers with a smile.
“My turn,” she said, ripping it open. She then proceeded to roll it down his aching cock as slowly as possible, stopping every few seconds to rub or fondle his balls until they drew up tight and he was ready to beg her to finish him off.
Fortunately, before he went mad with want, she finally covered him completely and straddled him again, but before she could tease him any further, he fucked his entire hard length up and into her.
His hands gripped her ass as he marinated in the all-engulfing pleasure—don’t bruise her, he worried somewhere in the back of his mind—then Allie began riding him, urging him on, and he lost all sense of the world beyond the place where their bodies were joined and the frantic movements of their hips.
She drove them both to the peak, and when she came this time, her body clenching tight on his cock, he went over the edge with her.
Allie
In her dream, Morrigan looked displeased. You should have told the man by now.
“I will,” Allie said. “I just don’t know how he’ll react.” They were on a hillside somewhere. Maybe the Ozarks, or maybe some forested landscape that existed only in the land of the gods, wherever that was.
After some truly exquisite truck sex, she and Cam had put on sweatpants—it would be idiotic to remain even partially naked when they might have to fight or run at a moment’s notice—and lain together on the pickup’s wide seat.
Dimly, she was aware of her body draped across Cam, the steady beat of his heart in her ear and the heady scent of sex, with just a hint of diesel, in her nose. If she concentrated, she could find echoes of those physical senses, but Morrigan was speaking again.
There is no more fuel. Morrigan regarded her. You’ll find what you need here. She gave Allie a visual of a large bike shop in a neighboring town. Mark it on the map the others are making. A strong idea, that.
“So we’re close?”
The other seer has a vision of your travel progress. She will know where to meet you—keep to the path. Another visual, this time of a map and their route.
“Are you working with Key too?”
Do not question. Morrigan looked amused. Simply know that we are all connected in this new reality—all who received the Dream, human and otherwise.
“The Dream?” For a moment, Allie had no idea what Morrigan meant, but then a memory rose up—and it chilled her blood.
A shark, enormous and ancient and ominous, knifing lazily through the dark waters of some deep ocean. A small school of black-and-white-striped fish swimming around it, tiny in comparison, seemed to be of no more consequence to the huge predator than the water in which it moved.
She’d seen those fish before on nature documentaries. After a second, her brain supplied the name. Pilot fish.
Then a jagged black vortex opened below the massive shark and its retinue, and all were engulfed by it in one tearing instant.
Allie could see it so clearly now, as vividly as the night she’d dreamed it mere days before news of zombie attacks began circulating. How had she forgotten? It had consumed her for days afterward—and others had dreamed it too. She even had a vague memory of it being talked about in the news.
She looked at Morrigan, unable to speak.
The goddess’s emerald-green gaze remained steady and fathomless. You remember because it is time to remember. Talk to the man about it tomorrow. Talk to his family.
Still struggling to understand what it all meant, Allie shook her head. “Can you tell me more?” she asked, hating how plaintive she sounded. “Were there humans who didn’t dream about the shark and the pilot fish?”
Morrigan began to fade, and Allie faintly felt Cam shift beneath her.
Sleep now. Rest for the day to come.
The next day, the truck ran out of fuel after only two hours of driving but within sight of the town with the bike shop Morrigan had shown her.
Allie had given Cam the basics of her Morrigan conversation once they were on the road, but she’d left out the Dream of the shark and the pilot fish, for the moment unable to bring herself to discuss it.
Instead, she used the time to scan radio stations—no one but MMSR seemed to be broadcasting in the area, although they caught a few fading stations as they headed north—and to mull over the Dream some more.
What did it mean? Why had it been so widespread? Had the entire world had one massive hallucination? Now that her memories of that time were coming back, she recalled that some sort of media-based hypnosis had been the prevailing theory before the memory of the Dream had faded.
But not everyone had gotten the Dream—Allie knew that, somehow, in her bones. That meant something, too, although she couldn’t figure out the importance, the distinction. The way Morrigan had spoken of it, Cam and his people would have gotten the Dream. She hoped.
What did it all mean?
She was afraid—more like terrified—to speculate. That horrible shark...
When the Ford shuddered to its final rolling stop, they pushed it off the road and out of the way, into a pocket of trees by a ranch house that looked to have seen better days even before the apocalypse hit.
Then they went through their packs and the remaining supplies in the extra bags to make sure they took as much as they could carry.
Cam grabbed the battery-powered radio they’d brought from the bunker, ready to pack it but lamenting the space it would take up, but then he remembered that they were tuned into Goddess Radio, thanks to Allie and Key.
He set it aside—his group had radios of their own of much better quality.
As long as they could trust Morrigan to keep them on track for another day or so until they met up with his group, they wouldn’t necessarily need to listen for transmissions or news from MMSR.
“We’ll leave the rest of the stuff here with the tailgate up.
Anyone coming by should look in it, and if they can use the stuff, great.
” Cam wiped his brow and pulled out the map.
“But we’ll mark this place. If anyone we know is in the area in the next few weeks, they should stop by and see if anything’s left. ”
They both sipped from their water bottles and listened to the mild drone of insects for a few minutes.
“Cam,” Allie began then stopped. How did you ask your... Lover? Boyfriend? Partner with benefits?... if he’d had a weird aquatic dream months before the world ended?
“I’m sorry I’ve been so in my head this morning.” Cam stepped closer, frowning—at himself, she knew. “I know your dream said we’re on the right track, but with the truck running low and worrying about finding what we need...”
Allie shook her head. “No, not that.” She swallowed. “Cam, do you remember right before things started getting bad... Did you have a really specific, really strange dream?”
Cam’s eyes flared wide, but the rest of his body went still.
There it is. Suddenly full of nerves, Allie filled the silence. “It was all over YouTube for a while and on some of the news channels, and then people just... forgot about it.” She swallowed. “I forgot about it too. Until last night.”
Cam’s eyes were very blue when they rose to meet hers. “The shark. And the fish. The fish all had stripes.”
White-hot relief spread through Allie’s body. “Yes. They were pilot fish.”
“Pilot fish. Okay.” He nodded slowly. “And they were swimming all around that huge, terrifying shark that I couldn’t really see”—his voice dropped low—“in this huge open ocean, and then a chasm opened up and swallowed them.”
“Yes.”
He swallowed. “Jesus.”
A high-pitched giggle escaped her lips. “Not quite.”
Cam laughed a little, too, but it was shaky. “Yeah, doubt that guy’s got a hand in this.” Then he cocked his head. “But if a goddess like Morrigan exists, do you think, like, the Christian God exists too?”
“Agnostic no more.” Allie gave him a half smile then shrugged and spread her hands. “I’m not really qualified for a theological debate. A goddess talks to me and shows up in my dreams—and She’s not the only old god out there. That’s the extent of my knowledge.”
He smiled. “Fair.”
“But She was the one who reminded me of the Dream.” She studied her water bottle. “And I think we’re going to need to talk about it with your family when we meet up with them.”
Cam looked thoughtful. “We talked about it, a little, after it happened. But not for long. It was like what you said—everybody went crazy over it for a day or two with ‘is this a sign of the apocalypse?’ chatter, and then it disappeared. Replaced by something else in the news cycle.”
“But it’s important. Somehow.” And thinking about that shark, remembering it so vividly, makes me feel insignificant, like an ant crawling on a busy sidewalk.
She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t.
She didn’t know how to explain to Cam that when she was in the clutches of the Dream, and when she thought about it now, the massive shark felt sleepy. Hungry. Malevolent.
Allie had always firmly believed that animals could not be evil, but the shark from the Dream absolutely was—so either the monstrous shark was an exception to the rule, or it wasn’t really an animal.
A shard of foreboding verging on terror worked its way through her insides.
Something in her expression must have betrayed at least some of her unease, because Cam nudged her arm.
“Hey.” When she looked up, he moved closer to wrap an arm around her shoulders.
“I know I don’t have the same kind of situation as you.
And I’m willing to bet you know more than you can even understand right now.
” He paused. “That’s scary. I know because I’m feeling it, too, for you. ”
His voice had gone tight, that too-serious, too-controlled cadence she recognized. This was Cam in full protector mode.
He wasn’t done, though. “But Key, and probably Odette and—well, shit, even Jessie—they’ll be able to talk with you about this stuff, help sort some of it out.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “You won’t be dealing with this by yourself anymore.”
Part of her didn’t—couldn’t—quite believe that would really be true, but even with the doubt lurking in the back of her mind, some of the pressure in Allie’s chest eased. For now, at least, she wasn’t alone.
She relaxed into Cam for a moment, savoring his warmth, his sheer aliveness, before she pulled back. “Let’s go get our bikes.”
The sooner they found Cam’s people, the better.