Flee the Terror Zone

Sheri waited as the sound of soft shuffling slid past the broken window. She held her breath for several long, tense seconds as she stayed crouched below the windowsill. She had caught only glimpse of the thing, a hulking mass of tendrils and what might have been leaves, slowly dragging itself along the ground. In the dim, misty twilight, however, there was no telling what exactly the thing had been, but in her experience, such creature's movements were deceptive. Large as a car, slow as a turtle, she'd tried running past similarly large and slow creatures, only for them to demonstrate terrifying bursts of speed once prey was in their sights.

Sheri looked back to her companion. Dar, the thin young man shivering in the corner of the broken down shack, was still keeping his eyes toward the floor, curled up with his arms wrapped around his folded legs, head buried against his knees. His breath was quick and shallow, on the verge of whimpers. Sheri put a finger to her lips and made as quiet a shushing sound as she could. The boy nodded, rubbing his forehead against his knees, but didn't look up or open his eyes. He did tightly press his lips together, which just made the air whistle through his nose.

Sheri grit her teeth, listening past this noise to detect if the creature outside the window was still moving. The shuffling came to a stop for a moment, and she thought she heard something like a series of rapid huffs, almost like breathless laughter. Then silence. Several agonizingly long seconds of silence. Then the shuffling continued on until it faded.

Sheri let out a low sigh, and said in a low whisper, "Okay."

Dar's breathing steadied a bit, and he peaked out at her from his curled up position. "Okay?"

"For the moment," she said.

"Okay."

They sat there for a bit just to be sure, as the cold, grey light slowly brightened a bit with the dawn. It wouldn't get that much brighter than it already was, though. Even at high noon, presumably with no clouds in the sky, an unnatural darkness persisted, as though a great, darkened lens had been stretched over the sky. A low, thick mist added to the effect, dimming illumination from every source on the ground. It wasn't just the usual sort of light diffusion, either. Light just died after a short distance, as if an unnatural limit had been forced upon it. Only the sun was bright enough to penetrate fully, and even then, the brightest day they had seen since the Terror Wave had fallen over their land was still only comparable to a cloudless twilight.

Sheri went over to Dar and gently shook his shoulder. He flinched and tried to tighten his body more, as if he could just will himself to shrink down to nothing. "Hey," she said, still softly. They never spoke above a whisper if they could help it now. "Come on. We have to get moving."

"What's it matter?" he muttered. "We've been traveling for days. We're not going to make it."

"Dar," she said. She was getting sick of his pessimism; it just made her own even worse. "Please. You don't want to get eaten."

"We're going to get eaten anyway," he said, finally looking up at her. "Everything out there is hungry for us. Our best shot was flying, and—" He shuddered at the memory.

Sheri closed her eyes and tried not to think of their two failed attempts at flight. There had been thirty-five of them to start with when they'd first taken off. Sixteen the second. Now, it was just to two of them. She still didn't know how she and Dar had survived, save perhaps by means of purely dumb luck. Most of their group had been lost in the sky, with the hideous flying shapes swooping out of the mist to snatch them up.

They'd been a variety of things. Birds, bats, oversized wasps. Each of them mutated, many tattered to the point she didn't think they should be able to fly. Some clearly were not even alive in the normal sense; they'd seen a bird skeleton flying through the air, impossibly keeping aloft on only the thin bones of the wings. They'd seen some kind of flesh-eating moth, so grotesquely fat it was nearly the size of a human torso; there was no way it could have stayed aloft with its rapidly beating wings, each still no bigger than a match-book.

Dar settled his forehead back onto his knees, closing his eyes. "We may as well just stay here. I'd rather starve than feed any more of them."

Sheri grit her teeth. She wasn't going to waste away. Better a quick death than a slow decay. She stood up and glowered down at him. "Move it or I'll drag you," she said.

"Go ahead," Dar muttered.

She didn't actually have the strength to, and he knew it. Not without using her power, and that took considerably more effort within the Terror Zone. She was barely able to keep it going enough to keep them alive, staving off hunger and the ill effects of sleep deprivation. But every time, before they could really build up enough power to get them anywhere, they'd be interrupted. She suspected the magic somehow attracted the attention of the creatures, like a candle light drawing moths from the night's darkness.

Sheri sat back down, her back against the wall with the broken window. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her nerves, tried to tell herself it wasn't really Dar's fault. She wasn't even sure why she wasn't the one curling into a ball right now. Was it her Magic? She still knew so little about it. Her mother's fault, of course.

All of this was. When women from other countries had snuck into their homeland and spread their wicked Sex Magic, offered their people a new life in a more "civilized" country, whatever that meant, her mother had insisted on staying in the tiny village she'd grown up in. She and a few other women had no interest in the backwards, morally bankrupt ways of other nations, and stayed in their village, refusing to allow their children to leave. Even after rumors that their Great Leader had attempted to destroy his own country, they refused to leave. Tucked away in their little settlement, they stayed secluded for the next ten years, not bothered by anybody. Perhaps they could have gone on living that way forever, had the Terror Wave not appeared.

Sheri hadn't even had her magic for more than a month. Her mother refused to talk about it. No woman in the village was willing to teach the girls of the power they would gain. None of the boys had any clue about it. Maybe the few men who stayed with them did. Sheri remembered nights when her mother would go to the "adult street", where the grown ups would sometimes go to do their grown up activities. Sheri wouldn't find out anything about them until she finally turned nineteen, gained own powers, and could see into the men's minds. She'd just seen a confusing whirl of lustful thoughts and aching needs that had shook her to her core. She was not completely clueless about sex, but she was not remotely prepared for the Magic that gave her such insight to the lusts of men.

When she asked her mother about it, she'd been beaten half to death.

Sex Magic was the power of demons, she said. It should never be used. To even acknowledge it's existence was to give in to inhuman evils trying to possess you. Sheri had to wonder if, had her mother known better how those evils worked, she might still be alive right now. The others might still be alive. Instead it was just her and the last boy from their village, and they were both just two small morsels waiting to be gobbled up by the horrors looming in the dark mist.

Then again, perhaps it would have made things worse. Sex Magic had caused this, her mother had said. The other women of the village had all agreed. Somewhere, someone had done something truly heinous with the Magic, and the Terror Wave was the result.

Some small part of Sheri couldn't quite believe it, though. Yes, the power had its wickedness. It let her see into men's private thoughts. From this, she gleaned the real power of her Magic, how it let her manipulate men's bodies through their lusts, control their genitals as easily as she could move her own fingers and toes.

But she knew, too, that it had its upsides. It had given them power to make it this far. Through moving the men, the women could fly. When the men got hard, it gave the women extra physical strength, even for even her mother, with her stick thin arms, to batter down a heavy wooden door with just a couple strikes.

She had once seen her neighbor use the Magic to heal her uncle's shattered ankle. She'd done it in private, but Sheri had sensed it all, "seeing" the woman through her uncle's perceptions. She had stroked the air in several different patterns, and her uncle felt her hands upon him. Not just the one hand she was stroking with, but every time she shifted her technique, a new hand following that rhythm appeared on her uncle's cock.

She kept him stimulated with two dozen Phantom Hands, the pleasures overlapping, competing, combining on his cock. He had reached climax quickly, but the Magic had a way of stopping that, too, preventing him from cumming. It made the pleasure even more intense, so intense that it seemed to almost hurt. Within minutes, he was pleading. But the woman had shushed him, bending down and kissing the bruised, swollen flesh of his ankle. Charged by the man's own desperate need to ejaculate, the women used Magic to fix the broken ankle. Every kiss to the bruised flesh came away looking a bit less purple, a bit less swollen. The whole process had taken an hour, and her uncle was absolutely beside himself with sensual torture. But when the woman finally let him cum, drenching himself from with his seed, his ankle was completely fixed.

Sheri had gotten so into it, watching the scene, inflamed by the energy she was feeling, that when the man came, Sheri herself shuddered in orgasm. She had been thankful her mother wasn't there to hear her sensual cry. It was the first time Sheri herself had every truly climaxed. It was at that moment that Sheri understood why her mother was so terrified of the Magic's temptations. The pleasure gained from the men's sexual suffering was intoxicating. She wanted nothing more than to feel that pleasure again, but she knew it would hurt the man for her to feel it. But at the same time, she also understood that maybe her mother's paranoia was a bit misguided, if the Magic could do something so amazing as heal such a bad injury.

Sheri sighed. Whatever benefits the Magic gave her, it wasn't enough to survive indefinitely in this broken down hovel. "Dar," she said. "I'm sorry."

He looked up at her, puzzled for a moment. Then he jumped. Sheri felt the Magic inside her, concentrated on it, made it bloom in her core, and then pushed it outside of her. Dar's body reacted, as it had to. Sex Magic acted beyond the limits of the human will. No matter how much he wanted to resist, his body could not refuse her commands. His cock stirred, and started to harden.

Dar leaped to his feet and scrambled back, noisily driving himself against the far wall. Sheri tried to reach out and grasp his body, to use one of the dozen or so spells she'd sensed the other women use, but never got the chance to practice. She tried to imagine invisible hands grabbing his wrists and ankles, pulling him forward. But it was difficult. She couldn't see to manifest any grip with her power. Worse still, even as she pushed harder with her power, to broadcast that aura of lust that forced men to get erect, she felt him leave her field of influence just from crossing the room.

Men could not resist the power of Sex Magic, but the Terror Zone could. All the women had said so. Sheri, as unpracticed as she was, had felt it. Before this horrible darkness had come over their village, Sheri could have cast a Phantom Handjob to a boy on the other side of the village. Now, her simple aura had a range of a few feet, at best. It's why their attempts to fly had failed. They had floated with the slowness of a butterfly lazily flitting about, while the screeching horrors in the sky could strike at them like hawks.

And then there was the fear. Sex Magic needed arousal to function. It could normally force that arousal, but only because all men had at least a spark of sexual desire active at all times. At least it seemed so. Sex Magic needed only to fan that little flame into a roaring fire. But the Terror Zone snuffed that spark. It ate away at every emotion until even the basest, most primal of human desires, hunger and sex, could not overcome the sheer feeling of dread.

Even if her Magic had not been weakened, her Aura could not sustain a spark of arousal that was no longer there. She took a step towards Dar, trying to force it anyway, but he flinched back, dropped to the ground and sobbed.

He was afraid of her now, too. Afraid of her power, the way her mother had been. Sheri stopped short and dropped to her knees, gritting her teeth, tears forming in her eyes. She didn't want to die. But what else was there to do?

Dar shook where he crouched, fighting the desire to scream. To call for the beasts to take them and just end it already. Everything was out to kill him, and the one other person left had just tried to rape him. Sex Mages were monsters, just like everything crawling in the darkness. They just wanted to eat him in their own way. They just—

He heard a thump on the floor. Sheri was on her hands and knees, tears falling down her face. The sight gave him pause. For a moment, he forgot to be afraid of her. For a moment, he didn't see a young woman his own age, with the power to molest him at will. He just saw a scared little girl. More scared than himself.

For a moment, his heart skipped a beat. Hesitantly, he reached out his hand. As if moving through molasses, he shuffled over to her, crawling on his hands and knees one ponderous step at a time. Sheri was curled into a ball, her sobs getting louder. He reached out a hand and touched her, softly, as if she was the most fragile thing in the world. Then he squeezed her shoulder, gently but firmly. Her moans paused for a moment. Awkwardly, Dar put his arms around her.

She was warm. He almost hadn't realized how cold he felt until her body was against his. He curled himself around her, spooning her. Her chest pressed firmly against her back, his arm wrapped around her own arms which were folded against her chest. With his other hand, he stroked her hair. Her sniffles quieted. They both felt some of the fear abate, and tried to focus only on their shared warmth.

They weren't sure how long they lay there. Probably ten minutes. With the persistent darkness and their heightened emotions, it felt like hours. But finally, Sheri spoke. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Me too," he said. Then he swallowed hard. "Let's... let's try it."

"Hmm?"

"You're right. We have to go. We have to try."

She was silent for another minute before she said, "You're just saying that. You don't really want to."

"I don't want to be here either," he said. "I'm so fucking scared. It's not just the creatures out there, it's this place. It won't let us be brave."

Sheri shifted, pulling away from his embrace a moment so she could turn and hold him face to face. She gazed into his eyes, barely able to see through the faint glimmer of suppressed daylight steaming in through the window.

"I'm not strong enough," she said. "We'd have to go on foot, or..."

"No, fuck it," he said. "We go on foot, we're guaranteed to die."

"We go by air, we're guaranteed to die."

More silence. Then he said, "Up. We go up."

Sheri blinked. "How do you mean?"

"We don't know how high this darkness goes, but maybe there's a cap. A ceiling. Like a dome. We're never going to reach the edges trying to fly straight over the land. But if we went up, escaped the darkness in the clouds..."

"If it doesn't go all the way into space. If it hasn't swallowed the whole world."

"If."

Sheri thought it over. Maybe it was possible. The "ceiling" of the darkness couldn't be that high, or they wouldn't see the sun through it at all, right? If it capped out at even cloud level, they could break through, and then her power would be fully restored. And she could actually fly them at a reasonable speed to see if the darkness did end, of if it did truly cover the Earth.

She cupped Dar's cheek, then kissed him. Dar was stiff at first. He'd never been kissed before. But he pushed himself to respond. For a few awkward minutes, they pressed their lips together, moving and shifting to find a position that felt most comfortable. They focused only on each other.

And then, Sheri felt it. That spark of arousal. That tiny flame inside Dar's body that responded to intimacy. He wasn't feeling horny, exactly, just that simple pleasure of physical affection. It was enough, though. She reached into him with her strange power, imagining it like an actual flame cupped in her hands. In her mind, she gently blew into the flame, feeding it oxygen to make it flare brighter.

It was slow, but it was working. As she gently stoked that inner fire, she sensed his body more and more clearly. Suddenly, as if by instinct, she knew how to kiss him in a way that would make him respond more to her. She opened her lips, shifted her lips to more fully press against him, and pushed her tongue inside playfully. He was taken aback at first at her sudden forcefulness, but he found himself liking it. He'd seen a few couples kiss that way, and he'd always wanted to know what it was it like. It was better than he imagined.

Sheri pushed him onto his back and rolled over onto him. She was seeing the pathways of his body, the places to touch to make him respond. She kept up her kisses as her hands wandered. She didn't touch his penis yet, but focused on rubbing his chest and letting her hand wander teasingly down. She broke the kiss to slide her lips across his cheek and nibble lightly at her ear, before kissing down his neck.

He reached for her, wanting to return the favor. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should let him, or if it would be more effective to focus on his pleasure. But that was the beauty of sex, wasn't it? A couple's need was more than just feeling their own pleasure, they wanted their partner's pleasure as well.

She let him push back, rolling them over so that he was on top. He, of course, did not have her sexual senses, and so his efforts were blind. He was a virgin, he had never even kissed a until now, so of course, he didn't know what he was doing. He clumsily groped her breast, trying to speed things along, and kissed her a bit more forcefully than she preferred. She mentally sighed. Under better circumstances, she would take the time to teach him, but right now, they needed his Lust Energy as quick as they could get it, and that meant doing everything right.

"Let me," she said softly, cupping his cheek again and giving him her warmest smile. He felt a pang of self-consciousness, knowing he wasn't doing things right. She kissed him to banish those feelings. "It's okay. I want to." Her smile turned coy in a way that made him blush. He hadn't even known how excited that smile would make him, but the Magic had shown her exactly what to do.

Then she felt it, both in her senses and against her thigh. He was getting hard. She pushed him back and they were on their sides again. She teasingly played her fingers over the hem of his pants. She lowered her hand further and tickled the growing bulge with her fingertips, coaxing him to full erection. He let out a breath and pulled her in for another kiss. A bit more gently this time, more to her liking. So even he was learning, just not as fast as her.

He was fully hard under her fingers. Time for the real test. She cast a simple spell, making it so he would keep feeling her fingers lightly tickling along his shaft and head. She brought her hand back up lightly run her fingers along his chest one more time. She felt his heart beat in time with the pulsing of his cock.