Olfactory
Chapter 2
Monday morning arrived on schedule.
As did Marianne Baker.
The statuesque executive barged onto the tenth floor in a flurry of activity only minutes after Kelly had settled at her desk.
As part of the regular morning ritual of the office, an austerely attired administrative assistant matched her boss stride for stride, as the 4th most senior official in the worldwide conglomerate strode over from the elevator bank.
Messages from a clipboard were passed into her waiting fingers.
Scheduling updates were conveyed in hoarse whispers.
An intern at her elbow offered Marianne Baker a bottle of lemon San Pellegrino and a cinnamon twist.
Kelly had a lame urge to write ‘San Pellegrino’ and ‘cinnamon twist’ on the notepad at her elbow.
Marianne Baker’s tastes, her every wish, were important to her now.
Kelly had no idea why Marianne Baker was becoming her focus in life. It was something happening inside her, without her consent.
But it was not as if she minded.
As the familiar smell washed over her eager senses, Kelly found her fingertip plucking at the crotch of her dress pants. That smell—the pods, sure, but her smell, too—and the sight of Marianne Baker, svelte, long-legged and cool, all soaked into Kelly’s skin like a warm mud bath at a posh spa resort.
Kelly’s daily glimpse of Marianne Baker was as blissful as an erotic brain massage
There, right in front of her now, in real time, in the normalcy of her everyday workplace, Marianne Baker, the woman she had last seen stepping into some sort of alien cocoon that changed her and gave her that smell...
Unable to stop her finger and the shivery pulses that tingled all the way down to her feet and up into her skull, unable to slow her thoughts, unable to deny herself the raw pleasure, Kelly only checked, with a quick downward glance, that her hand, curling and uncurling between her thighs, was hidden behind her workstation. She had to keep that out of sight. Along with the wet spot at the cotton-spandex seam.
The frenetic little clique, the Queen and Her Court, as Kelly had privately christened them, had passed Kelly’s desk when Marianne Baker held up a finger, signaling wait a moment!
She turned around. Facing Kelly full-on.
Poised, hip-cocked, Marianne Baker, in all her glory, looked straight back at the shy systems analyst and took a couple of steps towards her underling’s desk.
Blessing the dazed engineer with a warm smile.
“Ms. Smigel—Kelly—how are you?”
Kelly was conscious, in her peripheral vision, of Marianne Baker’s administrative assistant, a very senior executive herself, studying her speculatively, sneering a little with confusion. Evidently wondering why her boss was paying attention to a mere systems engineer.
The coldness of the administrator’s gaze bordered on contempt, but Kelly no longer cared. Was this severe-looking businesswoman aware of the smell? Did anyone else, besides Marianne Baker and Kelly, notice it? In other words, was Marianne Baker having an effect on others, or just her, Kelly?
If the administrator-assistant, Ms. Poker-Up-the-Butt Schoolmarm, was not susceptible to the smell, the ambrosial effects of Marianne Baker, if she was not, in essence, thriving on the redolence and desperately in love with the Goddess beside her, well Kelly was sorry for her.
What she was missing!
The marvel that was Marianne Baker and the pod smell engulfed Kelly so totally it made her dizzy. Warm butter melting all over her.
Somewhere inside, Kelly recognized her state of mind probably fell somewhere on the clinical spectrum between disturbed and completely psychotic. Considered objectively, it was of particular concern that she was being affected, drugged, maybe changed permanently, by an outside force the source of which was unknown to her. Aliens? Some exotic scientific experiment? By any measure, it was childish to have a puppy love crush on her senior colleague—to be so consumed mentally, physically, and emotionally by another human being and her, well … yes … smell.
And if aliens were doing this…
But it felt so good. It felt right. That made it impossible to ignore.
It was impossible, really, not to give in and allow herself to be enthralled this way.
What was love, really, anyhow, but an emotional, and biological, chemically-reinforced pleasure impulse binding oneself to another?
“Good morning, Ms. Baker,” Kelly answered brightly. “I’m fine; how are you?”
She fought not to sound like a drowning person gasping for breath. Or a robot. Some part of her just wanted to drift into a mesmerized trance.
More than that: she wanted the smell inside her.
Her whole being was responding like an addict with a fix. An alcoholic sucking down her first scotch of the night.
To avoid obsessing over the pods or drooling over her mental image of the beautiful Marianne Baker stepping into….hers, Kelly reached consciously for her analytical skills, drew upon her training for explanations.
She scoped the administrative assistant out of the corner of her eye, trying to figure out what was going on inside her. The middle-aged Indian-American had a cruel wasp-like shape that had always intimidated and, admittedly, also kind of titillated Kelly, in a cruel dom-like way.
But the admin manager did not look any sexier than last time Kelly had seen her.
She was no more voluptuous than when Kelly had first met her, maybe six months ago.
Kelly knew she would not smell like Marianne Baker.
She was not pod-touched. Marianne Baker—ohhh my yes—radiated sexuality, an over-the-top voluptuousness porn directors would kill to capture on film.
Was there a genetic component to the effect, then? People with congenital anosmia, Kelly knew, were unable to detect odors. There were other reasons for differences in people’s olfactory abilities, from age to illnesses, work environment to smoking.
Ah: so there it was. The fine wrinkling in the administrative assistant’s skin, the complexion damage: the wasp was a smoker.
She would not, could not, smell the pod smell.
Did that mean she was exempt from any and all effects of the pods, period?
Or did the pods and their creators choose which humans to lure in?
Had the pod creators—what?—aliens? scientists?—chosen Marianne Baker?
Had they chosen Kelly?
Or had Marianne Baker chosen Kelly?
For some reason, the thought that the selection might not be arbitrary, that there might be sentient purpose operating here was almost painfully stimulating. Did they want to do something to her, to convert her into whatever Marianne Baker was becoming? Make her into their creature somehow?
Change her?
Kelly was overcome by a rush of blood to her head.
Why was that so hot!?
“Pod-chosen,” she mumbled, tasting the sugary flavor of the words on her tongue.
What if the pods had made Marianne Baker, who, with her looks, her style, her money, could have had any man, and, yes, any woman she wanted, even before all this, more sensually attractive in order to lure people like Kelly into the alien’s control?
Or Kelly specifically?
Kelly would have described Marianne Baker as hot at any time. But now that she had been affected by the pods, her pod, she was irresistible. At least to Kelly.
The psychology was disturbing and engrossing—both. Creepy but exciting. Had they found the key to female sexuality? And if so, what did this mean in terms of Kelly’s own behavior, her own fate, if she was thoroughly vulnerable to Marianne Baker and her charms? What did it say about free will and humanity’s conceit that we are in charge of ourselves and our bodies?
As Kelly’s attention shifted back to Marianne Baker, her breath caught. How could their work colleagues not recognize how transformed Marianne Baker was? How moist! How green! How thrillingly provocative she looked now, post-podding?!
To Kelly, the creature standing before her looked and smelled so obviously like a wet dream. A goddess. Her Goddess. Who could resist the graceful sweep of the uber-executive’s hips? That mouth-wateringly flat pelvis and abs? The slender waist accentuating breasts that belonged in a fetish video, begging to be touched? Squeezed.
Kelly could not stop picturing herself falling to her knees in front of Marianne Baker and pressing her face between Marianne Baker’s legs, into her joining, her most private place. This was utterly unlike her, at least in congenital terms, quite un-Kellyish, Kelly recognized. She’d been raised a Christian. Her mother—her mother would have been struck dumb by what her daughter was imagining. Her sister would have fainted dead away at the concept of her kneeling and tonguing Marianne Baker.
But that was what was so hot about it—the way she was changing.
Or rather, just that she was being changed. Against her will. Rarrr.
She could not really get her head around it, but Wow.
Kelly only kept her hands in her lap with intense effort.
“Get a grip,” she told herself. “This is beyond weird, Kells. Get a grip.”
But someone had asked her a question.
To avoid utter breakdown in the office in which she needed to continue to work to continue to receive a paycheck so as to be able to continue to eat and survive, Kelly knew she needed to answer normally. But she found herself tongue-tied, and just then—
Marianne Baker’s eyes changed from blue, to oily black.
And winked at her.
Marianne Baker winked at Kelly.
It was an inside-baseball, conniving wink.
Marianne Baker’s eyes—wilder still—shone jet black for a moment. Like a sudden eclipse of the two suns around which Kelly’s planet orbited now.
Of course, it was an intentional provocation, Kelly realized.
Marianne Baker was teasing her, taunting her.
Triggering her.
Unnerved, Kelly looked left and right. At the administrator. At the intern. Hadn’t they seen this? How could they not?!
But both of them were looking at her, Kelly.
As if she was the anomaly.
As if she was the strange one!
Were they partly right?
It made no sense that she, a mere systems engineer, should be the only person who could see what was happening. Or indeed the only one aware that anything at all unusual was happening.
But in her discomfiture, Marianne Baker came to Kelly’s aid.
As if to give cover to Kelly’s sudden inarticulateness, Marianne Baker, like a secret agent or collaborating criminal co-conspirator, an actor playing her role, remarked casually to her attendants, “Ms. Smigel and I have become very close.” She held two fingers tightly together. “We have shared interests.”
The whole scene was so charged that Kelly could not believe for a moment that, if nothing else, her friends on the floor, Nanette the unit lead secretary seated in the next workspace towards the lobby, or Deb, the company receptionist, who worked behind the raised lobby counter just beyond, had not noticed.
Deb was a supremely gentle woman who loved Labrador retrievers.
Didn’t she—did no one else see?
Were they all oblivious?!
Kelly watched Marianne Baker’s eyes like a cobra with a snake charmer. Or was it the other way around? Kelly had read that snake charmers hypnotized their pets. Their ophidian pets. Was she the pet? Marianne Baker’s little reptilian toy?
Hypnotized?
Marianne Baker was influencing her now, nudging Kelly further down this strange path, now that the smell had made Kelly susceptible.
Softened her up.
Although in some way, the idea terrified her, it also made Kelly’s hand press down into her crotch even harder.
Her palm cupped her mound, pushed at it, as if to move it somewhere else. She was being made different. She squirmed.
And Marianne Baker could tell. Marianne Baker knew. Kelly was sure.
Marianne Baker could see into Kelly’s brain, knew exactly what was happening in the dark attic recesses there.
The executive’s expression conveyed ineffable empathy, and irony. She reached her hand out to rest it on Kelly’s where it sat on her mouse, and smirked.
Her touch, the slyness of Marianne Baker’s manner, the corrupt feel of it, the presumptuousness, the arrogance, the personal intrusiveness, all sent bolts down Kelly’s nerves to her crotch.
“It’s good to see you again, Kelly, dear,” Marianne Baker purred unctuously, and again, for just a moment, as Kelly stared, the gorgeous executive’s eyes shaded to green and then flashed dead black, before turning green again. “We need to talk about the last time we saw each other.”
It was so evil somehow and Kelly stifled a moan—but Marianne Baker had already turned and entered her office, snapping orders to her minions.
The assistants came back to life and resumed ignoring Kelly again. Normalcy settled back down like amber. The whole interaction took on the feeling of a passing daydream. In some way, a terrifying nightmare too—a hot mix of both.
Kelly had no doubt she was cracking up, losing touch with reality. But her foremost thought was: if going crazy felt this good, why did anyone fight it?
Being changed, podded was so pleasurable!
At five-thirty, Marianne Baker’s door was still closed.
Kelly went home.
She was not hungry, or at least not for food, so she put on a bathing suit. She swam a hundred laps in the housing complex pool, hoping to wear herself out physically. She needed sleep badly, and hoped exercise would help.
She had to get her mind off the pods and the weird compulsions some alien force was trying hard to insert into her mind.
Into her pussy.
It was not just in her mind and down there, either; it involved every cell of her body. All the time she was in the pool, Kelly was conscious in an entirely new way of the viscosity of the water. Cross currents and little vortexes swirled around her torso, her legs, her vagina. It felt as though she had put on new, changed skin, a new hyper-sensitive epidermis that only looked like her own.
She was becoming different, alien, in her own skin.
Twice Kelly found herself unconsciously palpating her crotch and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. One college-age kid in board shorts was watching her with wide eyes, fascinated; was there a bulge at his groin? He looked to Kelly like a freshman athlete. Maybe a footballer. Or a gymnast: good arms, a modest but defined chest…Kelly licked her lips but avoided eye contact for fear of encouraging him.
Or herself. “It wouldn’t look good for a 28-year-old professional to jump on top of a callow youngster and ride him like a bronco,” she noted sensibly in her head, before she heard how she herself sounded and winced-laughed.
Crass crass crass!
But it occurred to her that, like Marianne Baker, she might seem particularly hot herself right now.
What a thought that was! Mmmmm. Was she beginning to smell too?
Was her smell, her pheromones, now beginning to affect others? Turn them on—the effects contagious like a viral pandemic?
The three or four other people scattered around the pool were all women and all focused on their own concerns. But Kelly left, well before she had planned, fleeing her own bizarre thoughts.
“A smell?” Myra—“Mee”—Acharya asked. “A smell.”
“A smell.”
“A smell.”
“Are you hearing an echo in the line?”
Mee cackled.
Kelly had reached the sheriff’s lieutenant at her home outside of work hours.
“We have not spoken in years and you call to report not a murder, not a crime, even, but a smell?” The law officer’s laughter was jovial, amused. Kelly was providing a nice break in her daily grind. “Is this about the sourdough craze during the pandemic? Gotta admit that got a bit out of control. Maybe your executive picked up a cooking hobby? It’s been the year for that. Midlife boredom, pandemic isolation, all that gets the best of us.”
Mee’s giggles rattled Kelly’s ear buds.
Just back at her apartment building after a jog, Kelly tried to picture her old friend. Mee Acharya was only two years older than Kelly and, in high school, just one grade ahead of her. (Studious schoolgirl that she was, Kelly had skipped a grade.) Mee Acharya had run a close second to local beauty Chandra Allingham in voting for homecoming queen her senior year even though Mee was not at all a socialite, or in the typical candidate pool for class royalty. Her father was a waiter, Kelly recalled. Still more unusually, Mee was completely oblivious to school politics—she did not even seem aware that there was such a thing as the class court—and was absent almost every weekend rock climbing or mountaineering.
But she had charisma, looks. The boys had chased her relentlessly until she and Chandra had been caught together the night of the prom, and many masculine hearts had been shattered.
“It’s not just a smell, Mee! And she’s been going to the basement…!” Kelly paused. As close as they had been when their families had lived next door to each other and their bedroom windows had faced each other across a narrow strip of suburban grass, it had been years since Mee and Kelly had done more than exchange holiday cards. Kelly was not sure she could jump straight into the strangest aspects of what she seen without triggering a call for a 72-hour mental health hold.
For her, not Marianne Baker.
“Oh my! Hanging out in basements! That’s very suspicious…” Mee snickered again, sounding distinctly un-coplike. “That’s where all the skullduggery happens. At least in Agatha Christie novels. Tell me she was cooking meth there, at least. You gotta give me something, Kells!”
“Mee! This is serious! I’m worried!” To be honest, Kelly realized, some part of her was petrified. The whole scenario was completely outside her life experience, her ability to comprehend, and she felt the danger as near and real.
Mee’s voice softened. Her tone became more solicitous in a way Kelly was pretty sure it did when she was dealing with members of the public whose sanity she questioned. The crazies in the drunk tank, the old lady losing the battle with Alzheimers.
“Are you trying to report a kidnapping, Kells? Is that what this is about?” This was Mee trying to lure Kelly into some semblance of rationality.
But Kelly pictured Marianne Baker as she had last seen her, and realized her mouth was watering.
“No, uh she—the victim is still, still—present.”
“Does she appear injured or hurt?” An obvious question, the logical follow-up, Kelly thought.
But no, Marianne Baker looked great. So great.
Lush as ripe fruit.
Lovely.
Hot.
If only you could see her, Kelly thought.
But she couldn’t say that, could she?
“No. No, nothing … obvious.”
Mee’s voice softened further. Kelly and Mee had once had a drunken evening of experimentation; they had liked each other a great deal, years ago, and Mee was possibly genuinely concerned now.
Not about any perceived danger, Kelly understood.
About Kelly’s sanity.
“So you are not alleging a non-consensual act or physical harm of any type?” Mee sounded lawyerly, but she coughed, and Kelly suspected she was diplomatically stifling another involuntary snicker. “As a woman who applies logic in her profession, Kells, you can see that does not sound like an obvious basis for probable cause?”
Kitchen noises filtered down the phone line.
Snatches of a television show in the background.
Mee was doing her utmost to give her old friend an honest, straightforward read on the situation. “Maybe the remedy would involve something outside of law enforcement? Have you talked to a therapist? My wife is involved in cognitive behavioral research; she may be able to recommend a good counselor.”
Great, Kelly, mused. All I have accomplished is to convince an old friend I am in need of serious mental help.
She thanked Mee hurriedly and told her she had to take another call. Work.
“OK! Ok, fine, Kells. But call back if something, something more—happens, and don’t be a stranger! Tania and I would love to have you over for dinner and .. a visit.” Something about the way Mee lingered on the last few words hinted to Kelly that she was still interested, despite the odd turn the conversation had taken, in something sexual.
“Even more terrific. She thinks I am nuts, but apparently still worthy of a three-way tryst!” Kelly thought of the way the college kid had looked at her, out by the pool the prior evening.
She really was becoming more sexualized somehow, like Marianne Baker, even if it was only in her own head and even though she had not been … well…’podded’ yet. People were picking up on the little cues that tantalize us all.
Was it a result of the smell alone?
In the aftermath of her conversation with Lieutenant Mee Acharya, Kelly thought about hormones. Did hormones alter your body chemistry on a fundamental level, and weren’t pheromones just inhaled hormones?
As she contemplated the idea—that she was possessed in some way and becoming sexualized against her will—she realized she was more excited after her conversation with Mee than before. Maybe more than she could ever recall having been excited.
The thoughts? Talking about the Marianne Baker and the pods?
Kelly hurried back to her apartment, went straight to her bedroom, rolled herself under the quilt, and grabbed her pussy as if it was a spooked animal about to escape without her.
She pictured Marianne Baker, Mee Acharya.
Kelly imagined them both coming out of the pods, looking at her with oily black eyes—and she, Kelly, driven to submit, steadily becoming enslaved.
The first touch to the tender flesh between her legs jolted Kelly like a taser. Three more firm strokes brought on the first of several orgasms that left Kelly wrung out like a used dishrag.
She did not regain consciousness until late the next morning.
With more reflection, Kelly decided she need proof. She considered returning to the B3 sub-basement and getting pictures with her cell phone.
Maybe she could even get some video. Video would show that—well that she was not nuts.
Or, better yet, she could take a paring knife down to the pod room and cut a scientific sample, to bring to Mee to be analyzed.
But where? In the crime lab?
Again, on what basis would they study it, without a crime? And even if they did, would she need a warrant? How about the chain of evidence question they always talked about in Law and Order?
On the other hand, Mee was smart, down-to-earth, very practical. That was part of the reason she had advanced so swiftly in a profession like law enforcement that did not tolerate fools—or women of any kind—easily. Maybe Mee was right that this whole affair was a mental, emotional or psychological problem, something screwy in Kelly herself, a function of overwork.
Stress, perhaps.
Mee had offered to connect her with psychological support through her wife—but Kelly already had a therapist. Duh. And Leila already knew about some of this; however uncomfortable sharing the details with her might be, there would be a lot less explaining with Leila to get to an honest opinion on her mental lucidity. And Leila was a board-certified psychiatrist, with twenty years of experience considerable community esteem, disproportionate to her relative youth and her thirty-something good looks. Ideal, really.
If she could not get the police to investigate, Kelly decided she should at least get a credible witness, someone outside the company and Marianne Baker’s sway to affirm that Kelly had seen what she thought she had seen.
Leila was the obvious choice. Leila would serve very well.
And if they visited the Metacom basement together, and she still thought Kelly nuts, at least Leila would be bound by patient-counselor confidentiality not to ruin Kelly’s employment prospects forever by disclosing the fact Kelly was bonkers.
“Leila would know what to prescribe to straighten me out, if I am in fact bonkers,” she laughed to herself.
Trying to see the humor in what was happening to her.
One concern—Kelly was not sure what her mind—her alien-influenced brain—might do at the pivotal point, since she was aware she was not fully running the show now.
Would she be tempted to step into a pod right in front of her best friend?
Given the way she felt at times these days, and the thoughts Kelly had been thinking, it did not seem impossible by any means. She had to be careful that, she cautioned herself, she did not have a breakdown, and submit to the alien influence, right in front of her friend Leila.
That would be humiliating. But also—she tried not to feel herself getting wet.
“We are naturally submissive creatures,” Leila remarked as they arrived together at the Metacom complex.
Kelly was driving. She slid into her normal parking place some distance from the lobby doors, even though almost the entire lot was empty on a quiet Saturday evening.
Leila and Kelly had stopped for a drink to brace themselves, and Leila was not finished with alcohol-tinged ruminations. “That can be said in a way even about dominants in a relationship with unequal power dynamics, since it all derives from our natural gregariousness. We depend on our instinctive sociability to survive, I mean, or we did in the jungle days. So there is an interpersonal need … for submission to …each other, really… “ The esteemed therapist belched. The she shivered for some reason too. “Excuse me. Or not—whatever. Then there is the procreative function. Which may be all mixed up in this,” she added, shivering again. “Something about sex involves submitting to the wants of another, and/or tangling up with another person physically and very personally. We meld our bodies and blend our bodily fluids, we mix up our chemical makeup in that process…” Leila looked excited by the idea.
“The ‘jungle days,’?” Kelly mumbled. She was not really paying attention. Her pulse was racing. She dug in her pocket for her key card and found that the mere touch in the area of her pussy increased the tingling down there.
It had now occurred to Kelly to wonder what Leila would say if it did turn out to be just Kelly’s imagination. As vivid as Kelly’s recollection of what she had seen in her prior visit to the B3 subterranean realm, of the rooms, the pods, of Marianne Baker naked and stepping into her pods (OMG! Kelly squeezed her thighs together at the memory), it seemed genuinely possible now that she had just imagined it all.
“Horny lonely Kelly had a wet dream is all, in essence!” Kelly thought to herself. But as embarrassing as the thought was, it was still too important to sort out what was going on to quit now. Kelly was committed to visiting the subbasement again. To finding out for sure one way or the other.
The two friends crept quietly down the weird narrow spiral staircase to B3, like secret agents on a mission, although neither could have explained just then why it seemed crucial to be quiet. Fear of the unknown was beginning to eat at them both. Something about Kelly’s intensity had begun to get through to the psychologist; Leila’s expression was now serious. She was visibly nervous.
When they reached B3, Kelly led her friend confidently to the spot she expected the door to be.
It was not there.
Instead Kelly led Leila around in circles in the dark for five minutes because the lights would not turn on.
Finally, Kelly stopped, frustrated, ready to give up. They agreed to go back upstairs for flashlights.
“It had all seemed so real,” Kelly thought. But then isn’t that what any schizophrenic would say about her hallucinations?
Kelly was just envisioning herself locked in a padded room with a straitjacket for couture—when she caught a sliver of light … a green thread leaking out of what appeared to be an uninflected section of concrete wall.
They were standing right by the door. The hidden door. It felt like finding a portal to another world.
And it was also as if Kelly had been programmed to find it. The human mind as a radio receiver into which an alien species had found a way to beam information, ideas, commands—directly into her head?
Like a robot. That the creators of the pods operated.
Terrifying… Hot...
Leila put a hand on her shoulder and Kelly squeaked. She coughed to cover her reaction, pretending she had gotten moisture in her windpipe.
“Ever do that,” she asked, avoiding meeting her friend’s gaze, “swallow wrong?” For some reason it felt important not to let Leila see how scared she was.
Or how excited.
Kelly set her jaw. She was an engineer. Feminine as she might look, she had been known for steely self-control during PhD dissertation presentations, graduate exams. Although sometimes Kelly herself believed it to be just her own diffidence expressing as taciturnity, during office emergencies, Kelly was looked to for her calm demeanor, and in crisis, her ability to handle even the most fraught disputes neutrally and dispassionately.
And she really did need to show Leila exactly what she was talking about. She needed her witness.
Before she went nuts for real.
She peered into the anteroom that extended off the main hallway: empty.
They hurried on past but the whole cavernous space was as Kelly recalled it, and as she had described to Leila.
Without warning, the therapist, a step or so behind, gripped Kelly’s trailing hand in both of hers.
“OK, I am beginning to believe that everything you told me is true,” she hissed. “This is truly creepy. I cannot imagine that the Metacom was built on … whatever this is. Some kind of cavern…? How do you think it was dug, or built? Or found? And you think what—aliens?” She was whispering.
Kelly responded in kind.
“Or some advanced governmental operation. A cutting-edge scientific experiment maybe? Some secret federal agency? I don’t know!”
Kelly looked back at her friend. Leila was taking in every detail of their surroundings with the wide-eyed wonder of a child on her first day at a new school. In all of Kelly’s experience with the therapist, she had never seen fear in those expressive amber eyes.
Kelly felt a twinge of guilt because the part of her that had been seeking vindication celebrated her friend’s discomfort. It was a relief to see someone else finally experiencing what she, Kelly, had endured alone in secret for the past three months. Leila’s bafflement, shock and incomprehension upon seeing for herself what was going on down here in the underground went a long way towards validating Kelly’s own reaction. Leila was, by definition, the sanest person Kelly knew; if she was unsettled by what she was seeing, Kelly knew she had not over-reacted.
It was not all in her mind.
No, this was balls-out craziness in real time.
So why did she, Kelly, want it to be real? She knew the answer to that.
Because it was exciting her to the point that she could smell her own excitement.
Underneath her clothes, Kelly’s body tingled. Her pussy juiced.
With every step closer to the pods blood thrummed in her veins.
They rounded the masonry abutment separating the anteroom from the gaping end room at last and there, in dim silhouette, were:
The pods.
Yes! All in a row, with the rushing waterway behind, and that smell, the smell.
The smell was thick as fog here.
Kelly basked in it, slowing to a stop to let it sink in. Into her skin. Into her body.
Into her soul.
Changing her more right now, she imagined.
The feeling, together with the sense of wrongness of it all, had her panting with tension. And on the brink of orgasm.
She had to hide it all from Leila, though. Kelly squeezed her thighs together and held on tight. She had to—had to—
Suddenly light blazed all around them. Blinding them.
Murky shadows emerged abruptly into bright colors, mostly rich greens.
Both women jumped.
And gasped.
Marianne Baker was there. Standing between them and the pods, just a few yards away.
The striking executive was fully clothed. (“Thank heaven,” Kelly mumbled to herself.) She wore a crisp business pant suit, as if ready for a board meeting. Marianne Baker always exuded authority, but now, here, she was somehow royalty. The empress of the underworld welcoming new subjects.
“Oh shit,” Leila said, and Kelly had the same thought:
She was going to lose her job and they were both going to be arrested for trespassing.
Duh. Obviously.
Here she, Kelly, had tried to get the police involved, imagining they would take control and summarily straighten things out down here. But of course, Marianne Baker, as the top operating executive of the conglomerate, was technically the building manager. She was in charge down here just as she was throughout the rest of the building.
How ironic. How embarrassing. She would of course have them arrested.
How had Kelly’s obsession with the strangeness of the scene down here skewed her perspective so badly? She had clearly not been thinking rationally.
“How—“ Kelly started, stuttering. Then she dissembled. “We were just trying to find out what …”
“Kelly. Kelly. Kells…” Marianne Baker, with an endlessly patient, gently tolerant expression on her face, spoke. Her voice was throaty and warm as breast milk. “I’m not going to have you arrested, silly. You have been such a good girl.”
A ‘good girl!’ Kelly blurred. Her mind spooled uselessly and her pussy heated further. Her head was not up to the task of figuring out what was going on. How had the hot COO, how had Marianne Baker, known what Kelly was thinking? To say things were confusing would have been the understatement of the year.
“What?! Why are you here?!” Kelly struggled to make words.
Leila and Kelly stood facing the senior conglomerate executive like boxers squared off for a match. But with the pods looming large and alive, almost pulsingly vital, behind Marianne Baker, they were way overmatched.
It was not even odds.
Marianne Baker had reinforcements, it seemed. Her team, her squad.
Leila leaned close to Kelly, still holding onto her hand, and whispered. “Jeez, is she always like that?!” And after another moment of awed ogling, she breathed, “I see what you mean; she IS beautiful…impressive. Wow.”
Relying mostly on reflex, as her mind tried to wrap around what was happening, and Marianne Baker’s words, Kelly struggled to provide an introduction. Her face flushed and she felt her crotch ooze with fulfillment, like it was being given a sexual reward.
“Mar—Marianne Baker this is Leila Kyrsak. Leila Kyrsak, Marianne Baker.” Kelly husked the words out, feeling hopelessly inept, a social incompetent, and yet wonderfully smitten. “Ms. Baker is the Chief Operating Officer of the Metacom conglomerate.” A part of Kelly just wanted to fall to her knees to recognize the importance, the sheer hot magnificence of the stunning businesswoman. A mental image of her leaning into lick Marianne Baker’s crotch as the important woman approvingly lifted her skirt and slid her panties aside—intruded into her thoughts.
Kelly prayed fervently and silently that there was really no such thing as mindreading and that her feeling at times that Leila and now Marianne Baker could see right inside her head was just a dark fantasy.
But Leila was focused on Marianne Baker too, and her response, “Charmed. Very nice to meet you,” sounded unlike the normally cool and professional psychologist. Leila was clearly stunned too.
They had begun walking towards the pods, casually, like visiting tradeswomen in town to inspect the newest products on offer.
Marianne Baker graciously leaned politely in to shake Leila’s hand.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I have heard so much about you.” Marianne Baker looked directly into Leila’s eyes and gripped the therapist’s hand firmly.
“And I you. It is very nice to meet you—huh?”
Kelly had been surreptitiously, greedily distracted watching Marianne Baker’s ass when something in Leila’s tone on the last word caught her by surprise.
She looked up.
Leila’s face had blanched. Her eyes flew wide.
Kelly turned and, thinking to calm her friend—we are all friends here, right?—placed her hand on Leila’s shoulder before she saw that Marianne Baker was still gripping her friend’s hand, and pulling her hard toward the nearest pod.
“What are you…?”
Leila was trying to pull her hand back, but not very effectively or with much strength; her eyes locked with Marianne Baker’s eyes, which, Kelly now observed with a shock had turned that oily black.
And in fact Leila had the helpless look of a teenager falling desperately in love but already regretting it.
She looked mesmerized.
Off balance, and not yet caught up to current events, Kelly focused on Marianne Baker, and saw something in the executive’s face she did not understand. Something about Marianne Baker’s face now reminded Kelly of the administrative assistant, ‘The Wasp.’
Kelly swallowed. Her mouth was dry. What!?
“I am so glad that Kelly brought you here to join us.” The hypnotic eyes left her prey’s and followed the psychologist’s slim body up and down. “You really are a choice morsel. Kelly has such good taste. She is really such a good slave—”
“What?! No!” Kelly roused herself, shook. She was mortified. “I’m not! I’m—slave?! Leila is my witness!”
How had this happened? Kelly had been feeling relief, comfort. She had been about to ask Leila if she, Kelly, had described the scene, the cavern, the pods accurately. Now this?!
“I did not—I don’t want—“
“Yes. That was a very cunning distraction,” Marianne Baker said approvingly. “’Witness!’” On her lips the word dripped sarcasm.
“No!—Yes! Leila is here to see—“
But already Leila was staring at Kelly with understanding, horror dawning in her eyes. She had grasped the wrist of the hand on which Marianne Baker was pulling with her other hand and was leaning back trying to resist.
But her face, turning towards her friend, Kelly, spoke of utter betrayal and defeat.
“Leila! No, Leila. I did not do that; I—nothing of the kind—I just wanted to show—”
But to her utter dismay, Kelly stumbled right then, and as she did so, realized that, since she was leaning towards Leila, as she caught her footing, she instinctively reached out with her hands.
With the result that her hands now pushed Leila towards the pod.
Her clumsiness made it look as though she were helping Marianne Baker.
She wasn’t! Was she?!
Was she trying to push Leila forward? Was her body under the control of some alien force, or … the smell? The way Kelly smelled the smell here, it made her think of the way pheromones trigger unconscious behavior. Was the smell working on her mind through her olfactory system?
The smell, their proximity to the pods, and Marianne Baker’s eyes certainly seemed to be getting to Leila, who was beginning to look dazed, drugged, too. It could have been the shock of her betrayal, of the dramatic reversal in circumstances, her terror. But it could also have been the smell.
“No. No, no—Kelly…” Leila was saying softly, urgently.
She was pleading, piteously: “Don’t do this! We are best friends. What—what is making you do this?”
Leila’s expression was so accusatory, so hurt, Kelly had to look away. She pushed herself back, away, with both hands before she realized that action also effectively pushed her friend further off balance.
And now with Leila off balance, collapsing clumsily, weakly, against the side of the pod, Marianne Baker, her hyper-vitalized alien-enhanced physique flexing, gave a last pull with one hand and a quick-lift with her forearm under Leila’s butt and the stunned therapist tumbled over the leathery rim of the pod.
Into the soup within.
“Wait! No! No! Leila! This is wrong! I don’t want this!” Kelly heard herself screaming, but it sounded as if her cry was coming from a distance.
And Marianne Baker was already in the pod with Leila, suit and all, and she seemed to be wrestling with Kelly’s friend.
“She’s undressing her,” Kelly’s mind inserted. “Of course. So that the pod can work…?”
Kelly reached for her friend again but for some reason, Leila was now not holding onto Kelly or fighting back, but reaching down, as if to protect her nethers.
Because Marianne Baker was pulling at her waist band.
And when Leila’s hand reached her joining, it was too late, because Marianne Baker had already yanked her pants downward. So somehow all Leila’s hand managed to do was smear green goop across her mons and those swollen swollen lips.
As Kelly watched in horror Leila seemed to convulse.
A network, an organic filigree, like the veins in a leaf, were showing now on Leila’s forehead and a green tracery up the back of her neck as if an invisible electrician was rewiring her nerves, or all her nerves were surfacing at once. Was there a tentacle reaching towards her sex?
This was how the pods worked!
Leila’s face looked at Kelly and her mouth said, “Kelly—Kells…” Then her whole body jolted again as if in an epileptic fit. Kelly lost her grip, and Leila fell backwards deeper into the pod.
With a vault that would have impressed a gymnast, a hyper-keyed up Kelly was over the side and gripping Leila under the armpits to lift her up, to pull her way from Marianne Baker, whose hands were all over the therapist.
Leila burst gasping from the muck, and Kelly felt cheered. She almost laughed with relief. But they must have looked like stumblebums battling over the last beer of the night, or fumbling toddlers wrestling in the kiddie pool years ago, Kelly knew. And there was nothing to celebrate in this. How had the pod gotten so big? Alien tech? Alien biology? Kelly leaned back hard, striving with all her might to pull Leila back to the leathery rim, so she could then haul Leila over the side and out to safety again.
But somehow this positioned Leila for Marianne Baker, who smiled gratefully at Kelly—no!—and, despite being splashed with the pod slime—a splotch of yellow-green goo gave her a funny one-sided mustache and seedy sideburns on the other side of her face—dexterously peeled Leila’s unfastened Leila’s blouse.
Kelly gaped and started to let go of Leila before she realized that would drop her therapist-best friend right back into the alien soup. She held her tighter then, but that helped Marianne Baker slip Leila’s yoga pants all the way off her greased legs, panties still tangled in the glossy cloth. She tossed them backhand out of the pod and leaned back towards Leila, still dangling from Kelly’s grip.
Leila!
Kelly had the stray thought that she had never expected to have her long-standing question whether Leila shaved or not answered quite this way. A very small and neat landing strip of ginger fur confirmed the therapist was a genuine redhead: Kelly’s gaze followed it down to Leila’s nether lips, which were naked and red.
Also very beautiful somehow.
They looked so tender.
Delectable.
Leila was a very attractive woman herself, Kelly noted to herself, before kicking herself for losing track of what she was doing.
Iridescent custard now dribbled all over Leila’s sculpted thighs, and as their struggle splashed it around, it reached her smooth and glossy mons, and suddenly Leila bucked.
At first Kelly had the impression that Leila was fighting harder now, trying to wriggle free. Leila’s tongue was moving as if she were vociferously protesting what was happening to her—what Kelly had done to her—but then the tip ran over her lips and her expression expressed her surprise—at what she tasted.
Leila licked her lips.
And swallowed.
And now the psychologist’s eyes were drooping. A dazed smile had appeared on her face.
She bucked as if tased, one more time, and, this time, moaned as well.
The pod custard was clearly having an effect on the pretty therapist.
Of course it was getting to Kelly, too.
The smell too was everywhere, intense, like a liquid in which they all three flailed as drowning swimmers, but just the touch of the green goo made Kelly’s skin tingle. A lot. It was a drug, a powerful one.
Designed to subdue humans? Subjugate them?
Kelly noticed that Leila was not only not fighting any more, she was thrusting her hips up in slow motion, like a sexual dance, a dazed writhing. It sure looked like the therapist was feeling intense pleasure. She might even have been orgasming.
Kelly knew how she felt.
If Kelly had touched her pussy lips with a free hand, or maybe even bumped Leila’s shoulder there, she would have come.
Orgasmed right there and crumpled helplessly into the green alien soup.
But there was something more helping Leila submit. Something tentacle-like was extruding from the pod up into Leila’s pussy. It was impaling her. And Leila was being held tight by the network of plant stems or wires Kelly had noticed moments earlier.
And tendrils had now reached Leila’s ears.
They were moving still, and—pushing inside.
Into her brain.
Kelly yelped at the sight.
It was too much.
She thought she might faint, but if she did so, she would drag Leila and herself down into the slime.
And that would be the end, wouldn’t it?
Marianne Baker wasn’t helping. No, she was massaging Leila’s thighs with both hands, her expression one of pure lust. The executive paused and gripped one tender thigh with her left hand while reaching the right one forward to—oh my lord—push it straight into Leila’s pussy.
So now Leila had a tendril and Marianne Baker’s hand—
Kelly flinched and juiced, and Leila screamed. But it was not pain and it was no longer fear, or not only fear.
Leila was looking at Marianne Baker as if deciding whether she wanted her to stop now or not.
Or maybe kiss Marianne Baker.
Leila turned her head a little sideways and looked up at Marianne Baker with a countenance that said, “please.” It looked as though she was begging Marianne Baker with her eyes.
Kelly, watching helplessly, still trying to pull Leila free, could feel it herself. This was not what Leila had wanted, no, but now maybe she did.
And Kelly sort of did. She wanted at least to see what would happen next. It would feel amazing, some part of Kelly’s mind was telling her, even as she was appalled at her own thoughts and what she was being forced to watch.
Marianne Baker was looking into the therapist’s eyes, and, ironically, in a very therapist-y way saying, in a cool-warm hypnotic voice, “Yes, yes. There you go. Give into it. Give in. You don’t want to fight now. You want this to happen … to you….” Kelly could feel the words working on her, in her, and she was beginning to swoon.
And Leila’s lips were working as though she could not help but repeat what Marianne Baker was drilling into her.
A blob of greenish slime bounced up onto Kelly’s cheek.
Kelly reached up to wipe the slime away instinctively and only succeeded in smearing more onto her face. But the touch made her realize:: she was crying.
Tears were streaming down her face.
“No no, Leila, I am so sorry,” she sobbed.
She had to let Leila know she had not betrayed her. She would never—she had never even imagined this. Had she?
But if not, why was she finding Leila’s drugged expression and increasing acceptance so fucking hot.
Why did she feel as though her own body was throbbing with sex?
“Leila,” she called, from seemingly a hundred miles away, “I would never—“ But her voice came out like a grunt and the words were unintelligible.
Kelly had been leaning over to try to protect her friend, but it occurred to her that from outside, from the virtual view of the ubiquitous security cams that were everywhere these days, except here, wherever this place was—it would look like she was pushing downwards.
She had enveloped her friend to block her from Marianne Baker and then to try to pull her friend’s pants up. She was trying, as a last gasp effort, to lift Leila up out of the goop.
But she was failing at all of it, failing each step of the way, and worse, that’s probably not what it looked like, or felt like to Leila, and when Kelly’s grip slipped entirely, she dropped hard onto her butt, jolting her spine.
And before she could get up again, Leila had vanished under the pale green slime, and Kelly felt the pod closing. Marianne Baker had popped out like a gymnast dismounting the parallel bars, but Leila was still inside.
The pod narrowed further, like reverse birth and it was ejecting Kelly as surely as it was sealing Leila inside, as though it had chosen its meal, the morsel it wanted to swallow. Kelly just barely squeezed herself out and fell onto the cavern floor as the pod made a kind of ripping sound—inverting expectations yet again—as it sealed over the comely psychiatrist. And in the moment before her horrified eyes saw Leila, who had pushed upwards with one last effort to escape her fate, sink back into the soup—Leila looked up at her, at Kelly.
Kelly met her friends frightened eyes and saw the accusation there, but also a burning need, overwhelming lust.
Leila’s eyes were intense, straining, and confused.
And Kelly watched as the light and the burning in those gorgeous amber eyes, the windows to her best friend’s soul, dimmed, the fire inside, the light of that beautiful mind, turning off, going out.
When Leila finally sank all the way into the warm soup inside the pod, there was a sound like a giant slurp. A huge moist kiss, perhaps, or the lick of a long-tongued dog.
And Leila was gone.
Kelly fell back mortified. She turned on Marianne Baker—
“You—you—what did you do?! How could you—Leila is my best friend!” The athletic engineer was incoherent with a welter of rage and anguish, guilt and libidinous overload.
The eyes that looked back at her were jet black and luminous.
Reptilian.
Alien.
But also so mesmerizing that Kelly was silenced. She felt an electric charge run down her spine and quavered, realizing that Marianne Baker had used that hypnotic gaze on Leila, and that had been half of the reason why her friend had been so easily overcome.
The other half?—Kelly, herself.
Leila’s best friend had betrayed her. Kelly’s sense of the horror of it, of the wrongness, of terror and horror on behalf of her friend made her strong, fierce.
She had to be valiant on behalf of her friend, at least for a moment and even if only belatedly.
“Leila is everything to me, you bitch! She is a respected psychologist and one of my only friends—and you have given her away to aliens!? How could you?!”
Kelly was not even sure what she meant about aliens, since she was completely beyond any reality horizon, but the feeling, the shock came from her guts, from the base of her spine, from out of her entire being.
Marianne Baker shrugged, unaffected. Despite her ruined business suit, the blouse torn half open and the side of her pants slitted up to her hip, like a high couture red carpet gown—aside from being gooped in greenish oils like the clothing of a kid who had played in spring mud—said calmly,
“She will thank you for this, Kelly. Sweetie; it’s all good. You will see how good it feels to do what you did.” She brushed some goop from her leg, just cleaning up, and gave Kelly an innocent smile.
“I did!? What?!” Kelly felt strangled. But her eyes met Marianne Baker’s, and she realized it did feel good. It felt so good it was like heaven surging through her body. The betrayal was so evil.
That look in Leila’s eyes, as she began to submit!
As the pod and the goo, the tendrils, sapped her intelligence and awareness, reducing the brilliant therapist to a slutty state of surrender?
Kelly squeezed her thighs together so hard she almost fell down again.
“Are you imagining what it will be like for you when it’s your turn? Think about it!” Marianne Baker’s voice was insinuating, snakelike. “Your friend Leila is learning obedience and feeling pleasure like she has never felt before—they can do that to us! Leila is having an experience for which nothing in her experience has prepared her and to which there are no parallels. Maybe an orgy or a party, with her sex and pleasure centers stimulated beyond anything she has dreamed, would be comparable, an apt metaphor, but her mind is being trained and rewritten. You will love it…”
“What?! No no no! This is crazy!” But words really were not adequate. “I will never…!”
But she thought “feel that in my pussy?” stupidly, hating herself not just for what she had done but for now feeling the feelings she was feeling and noticing how wonderful it felt, physically.
For having let it happen and letting it happen now.
For celebrating the idea of raw pleasure like a drunken frat boy at a rave. Kelly heard herself grunt, and with a strangled moan thought clearly, “I am being rewarded. I am being trained to obey.” A pause. “I should obey. I should enjoy it and obey.” Then she thought of Leila somehow learning obedience, she knew, and almost crumpled to the floor.
Despite her libido, Kelly rose clumsily again and forcing herself over to confront her sullied Goddess, grabbed the statuesque shoulders of her icon.
But even in the moment she did it, some part of Kelly worried that she would damage them, the perfection of the flawless skin, the untouchable perfection of female shapes, and that caused her to slow just for a moment.
And in that moment, Marianne Baker placed her hands on Kelly’s upper arms instinctively, self-protectively, and stared into Kelly’s eyes, and that touch—suddenly Kelly was weak. Submissive.
“Wasn’t that hot? To betray her like that. And turn her?”
“No! No! You’re evil. Do you even know what you have done!?”
Kelly was sputtering, but some kind of a current was passing through her torso. Oil-dark eyes were seeing into her soul, and she was aware that Marianne Baker somehow knew that Kelly was being generously rewarded.
Kelly staggered, so that her hands were now keeping her upright by hanging onto Marianne Baker’s shoulders.
“No, sweet Kells,” Marianne Baker murmured with a voice so insinuating it felt like it came from inside Kelly’s own head. “You know it was what needed to happen. We were made to submit and you know you wanted this for your friend. Deep within yourself, you have already been so well trained, so conditioned and you know. You have been obedient. As we all must be. And will be. Such a good girl.”
Kelly stared.
The phrase ‘good girl’ made her drip.
And then Marianne Baker’s hands slid up to Kelly’s shoulders, and pressed down so that Kelly, unprepared and undefended, fell to her knees.
And then she was gazing right at the small triangle of cloth that was Marianne Baker’s panties, her business suit’s wool trousers having dropped and it was true that this at least, was straight out of her wet dreams…
“Yes,” Marianne Baker was saying, like a mantra, chanting the words forcefully and mesmerizingly, metronome-like. “You obeyed so well. Such a good girl! Kiss me, lick me now—Thank me for helping take your friend.”
And the uber executive’s fingers were down there plucking the moist silk aside so that Marianne Baker’s shaved slit was inches from the young engineer’s face. Marianne Baker’s center, her most private and personal parts, were right in front of Kelly, inches away. And Kelly smelled that smell, the smell of the pods and the smell of Marianne Baker and there were hands tangled in her hair and her face was pressed into Marianne Baker’s pelvis, which was moving and slipping and sliding this way and that, up and down, side to side, screwing Kelly’s face and thoughts askew.
Just to catch her balance, only for that, like a desperate landlubber on a pitching deck, Kelly grabbed onto Marianne Baker’s hips and her fingers wrapped around her ass, and she was crying again, but she was also pressing her face into Marianne Baker’s pussy, her sweet pussy and it tasted like it smelled: it was heaven, and Kelly could not stop.
She could feel Marianne Baker’s tight ass in her hands, feel the executive rutting—rutting on her face and in some way it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Yes she was grateful to Marianne Baker and for whatever had been done to her. Yes that had been terrible when Leila had gone under, and terribly hot. And Kelly thought that if this was the reward, she might actually have betrayed Leila intentionally because it felt not only like her pussy was going to explode, but her face too, her face was going to come. All of her was soaked through with orgasmic bliss.
“There, yes, see?” the renowned executive growled. “You are being rewarded. You have been such a good girl.”
Kelly tried one more time to push away. “No! No! I’m not! I did not want that! What is happening? Leila is—Leila was my best friend.” But her body was spinning with pleasure. She thought she might be coming again.
She was coming even as she fought it.
And the fighting just made her orgasm, the heat inside her, more intense.
“Yes, yes—cum for me, Baby. This is what needs to happen, what you know needs to happen. Of course she is. She is beautiful and she will become like me. Like you. You are almost one of us now and you are next!”
Some part of Kelly’s body and brain did need to join with Marianne Baker, partake of her essence, taste her very core. She pressed her face, nose, lips, mouth hard and gratefully against Marianne Baker’s sloppy pussy and her tongue extended as far up inside the slippery pussy of the beautiful devious alien-altered lascivious executive as she could get it. Unnhhh. She had to taste what was inside this obscenely-shaped and intimidatingly-entrancing beauty. It felt like—
It felt like penance.
It felt like obedience.
It felt glorious.
Some resistant part of Kelly’s brain, the human, trained-in-engineering and logic part, however, still cringed at the horror of it all. She looked up at Marianne Baker’s flat abs between those luscious breasts, at that perfect face beyond, and asked the questions that had been percolating in her mind for weeks, unarticulated.
“Why? What is happening here? What is that smell? What is happening to you? To me?”
Marianne Baker smiled one of those cheshire Marianne Baker smiles.
“You’ll see. It’s OK. She may be in there for awhile…”
Then she glanced down at Kelly as if struck by a thought.
“Oh. Do you want to see?” She reached over to the pod and her palm seemed to stroke the veiny vinyl-like surface, and then, not like glass clearing, or video depixilating, but in some biological way, they could see Leila inside, squeezed tight as a bug in a rug.
Wire-like tendrils reached up and through her hair from the back of her head, moving, surging, and Kelly could see them connecting with her spine at both ends of the slender body, sinking into her neck behind her skull, and at the base of her spine, just above her ass. A kind of lattice work showed in the blank white eyes … Kelly’s best friend and therapist, Leila, did not look out at them because her eyes looked like they would never see again.
Kelly choked, sobbed, swallowed. “That’s so—so—“
But the words she was groping for would not come.
Because it was absolutely horrible and terrible, world and life ending. Truly.
But at the same time, too, Kelly could feel, as if she were connected with HDMI cables to her friend, the tendrils piercing into the back of her neck, something insinuating itself into her skull, wires spreading out above her tail bone to surround and connect with her spine, wires spreading through her brain and taking control or her, enslaving her—
And as horrible as it really really was, it was that much hotter.
“Can you imagine?” Marianne Baker’s eyes dove into Kelly. “Can you feel it—feel what it will feel like when it happens to you?”
“To—to me?” Kelly stared. She had heard that reference to herself several times now, but only just now fully considered what it meant.
She came again—but now the pod was opaque, and only the strange feelings inside her were left.