Field Work Ch. 06

By the time we were cumming, and falling apart, and weeping and panting into each other’s throats and crotches and armpits and navels, the four of us sprawling naked and blinded in the muck, we barely knew any more who of us were who.

But gradually, our senses returned, and we came to ourselves, wiping the slime out of our eyes, looking around at each other’s filthy, naked bodies, flushing with shame (but still hot from the flush of climax), too exhausted to try and cover ourselves up. Sophie was withdrawing her cramped and glistening hand from between Gail’s thighs, and trying not to meet Gail’s eyes; behind me, Alison coughed and discreetly dismounted me, pulling the dildo out of me, making me gasp as the tip left my ass.

Gail got out from under Sophie, wincing slightly. Sophie was flexing her hand and breathing heavily – I guessed that she had been fisting Gail, which would have been a new and somewhat shattering experience for both of them. Gail’s face was assuming a look of intense concentration.

“I think we know what that was,” she said quietly.

“Oh yes,” Alison mumbled. Sophie fished her glasses out of the muck, wiped them with a clean corner of her discarded bathrobe, and put them on. She looked around, then turned to look at the door - then she froze and hissed “There!”

We all turned.

Standing in the doorway, over seven feet tall, was a shambling, green, shaggy manlike object. I thought of my copies of Swamp Thing – but this thing didn’t look so patient. It had what, on a human, would have been called a mane of hair-like stuff, resembling weeds, that it tossed back. It looked like it was sneering at us.

“Thanks for the memories,” it rasped, in a deep, scratchy voice that nevertheless had something very familiar about it. It held up one hand – it was holding the digital camera.

“Good luck finding me,” it said. “Just so you know that the Chancellor can find out how you spend your evenings. See you.” And with impressive speed, it bounded off in a loping run down the corridor.

We were all silent.

“I think,” said Gail, “we now know what happened to Matthew.”

“I also think,” said Alison quietly, “we need to clean up this mess, and never mention this again unless we absolutely have to.”

We got our feet, and without bothering to dress, we laboriously cleaned up every drop of molasses, custard, extinguisher foam and bodily fluid from the lab floor and tabletop, then we showered together in a grim silence – after all, we no longer had anything to hide from each other – and we put on what was left of our clothes. By then, it was the small hours, and we went out to the car park and the four of us walked, still in silence, to Alison’s car.

She drove the four of us back to her house, where we sat around the kitchen table and had a stiff whiskey each. Not a word was spoken. Then, as it was beginning to grow light, we climbed wearily up the stairs, took our clothes off, fell as one into Alison’s enormous bed and slept for hours, Alison wrapped around Sophie, while Gail and I slept in each other’s arms.

I woke around midday the next day, as I lay next to Gail, watching her and Alison and Sophie sleep, I knew, with a sense of dread, that this was all going to finally get out, and then it was going to be taken out of our hands, and somebody was going to fuck it up even worse than we had done.

And sure enough, that’s what happened. But things don’t always turn out as unambiguously bad as you’d feared. Sometimes, an apparent enemy becomes an ally; an obstacle can be turned into a weapon; a disability can be employed as a talent. We didn’t know, at the time, that was what was going to happen; all we knew for certain is that it was going to get worse, before it got better. And it did.

And the way that it got worse could have been predicted all along.

The Americans got involved.