It's Always Time Act 04 Ch. 01

"Yeah." Dee shook out his hair, exhaling. "Yeah. So, anyway, Eurydice, I can't go in there without innocent people getting hurt." Ursula coughed and Dee added, "Innocent of this matter, I mean, and too many people've gotten hurt already. Cherry Cupcake could not have picked a better spot to take Galatea."

"If Cherry Cupcake's in there," Yves pointed out.

Dee shook his head. "She's definitely in there. I can tell."

"How can you tell?" Yves asked. "Are you sure?"

["…Oh, Master. I'm in you now. I'm in you…"]

"I don't know," Dee lied. "But I'm sure."

Eurydice still glared out the window. "We're being watched."

Yves threw the gearshift into reverse but pushed hard on the footbrake. "We’ve got a choice: leave at the first sign of trouble or at the last possible moment. Staying is not an option; we are not ready for a fight."

"Leave at the last possible moment," Dee said, "and try to learn as much as we can." He turned around. "Is that okay with you two?"

Eurydice nodded. Ursula said, "You can just leave Galatea?"

"No," Dee answered, "but if Yves says we're not ready, I believe him. I don't want anyone else getting hurt because of my mistakes."

"What about Cherry Cupcake hurting Galatea?" Ursula asked.

"She won't do anything to Galatea until after we make our move," Yves said. He sought confirmation in Dee's eyes.

Dee nodded, shivered at the memory. ["…You'll never push me away again…"] "She wants my attention," he said. "She wants me thinking about her all the time. Right now, we've got no plan and little information. Charging in blind would mean I'm not taking her seriously, and that would put Galatea in real danger. Plus, the parking lot is full, so I can't go in there without being buried in Easies. Eurydice, what are you smiling about?"

"I'm thinking of you fucking your way out of a mob of frenzy-sisters." Her teeth were daggered. "It's an interesting mental image. I bet you could do it." Eurydice sat up and pulled the sunglasses off her face. "Orpheus couldn't handle it, they fucked him apart instead, but you'd get through, Dee…Ursula, you okay?"

Ursula groaned, clutching the sides of her head. "My worldview hurts."

"We've got company," Yves said, his hands worrying the steering wheel.

The three passengers followed his gaze. The heavy front door to the sorority house bumped open and a tall coed in ragged jean shorts and a white tee-shirt shuffled through. Her hair was a bird's nest of red tangles.

"That's the worst case of bed-head I've ever seen," Yves said as the newcomer stumbled down the porch steps. A brunette coed in the same outfit tottered out of the building behind her and Yves quipped, "Okay, second worst." A blonde carrying a plastic bucket followed, fumbling the door closed behind her. "Christ, it's a makeover emergency."

The trio bumbled around the yellow SUV. The blonde upended the bucket and a flurry of towels fell onto the driveway. The brunette pulled one end of a garden house from the shrubbery and blasted the SUV with a jet of water. Her aim was unsure and wild. She stood with the hose shooting water straight up into the air as her friends divvied up the towels. Water splashed down over everything.

Ursula kneeled in between the front seats of the Jeep, squinting. "Are they stoned?"

"I know them," Dee said, and as soon as he spoke the trio of coeds turned to face the Jeep, their motions fluid and synchronized. The brunette kept the hose firing into the sky. The trio was sopping wet in moments, their shirts slick and translucent. The redhead pulled a bottle out of her shorts and squirted its contents into the bucket.

"There's no fucking way they heard you from there," Yves hissed.

"They couldn't, all by themselves," Eurydice murmured, "but maybe someone else is helping them."

"I'd vote for the blonde in a wet tee-shirt contest," Ursula said. "Just look at those. Damn, I can see her nipples from here…What?" She poked Dee in the shoulder. "C'mon, back me up on this."

"What the Hell is going on?" Dee asked her. The three coeds triangulated their attention to the front passenger seat of the Jeep.

"Not another word, Dee," Yves said.

The brunette brought the hose down, training its spray at the bucket. The jet of water caught the redhead in the ear as it arced downward. Her hair flew wild. She did not flinch or move an inch.

Ursula swore. Dee opened his mouth but Yves punched him in the arm. "Shut up, Dee," Yves barked. "They're putting on a show, trying to get you to…" Yves' eyes watered. "Ow, Jesus, ow." Yves cradled his right hand in his left, massaging his knuckles gingerly. "It's like punching a brick wall."

"Marble," Ursula corrected. She poked Dee's shoulder again. "His skin gives." Dee turned and made a sour face at her but she ignored him, exploring the hollow of his collarbone instead. Her fingers worked under the narrow strap of the muscle shirt. "His skin gives as you'd expect but the musculature underneath is marble." Dee grumbled and folded his arms. Ursula gasped as his shoulder flexed beneath her palm. "Stone sliding against stone," Ursula stuttered, voice hushed. "Polished granite or greased marble…"

Eurydice cleared her throat in the sudden, icicled silence.

Ursula withdrew into the back seat. "Look," she told Eurydice, "I'm gay, but I'm not dead. I can see the attraction of that sort of thing but I don't want it." Dee grimaced and rooted around the Jeep's glove compartment. Ursula pointed out the window to the driveway where the coeds, their expressions cockeyed but otherwise blank, were busy soaping up their SUV and each other with sudsy towels. "I'm much more interested in the Night of the Living Coed Carwash going on out there."

"They've been 'mindfucked,' right?" Yves asked. "Cherry Cupcake's gotten into them. How much nanomek does that cost?"

Dee found a pen and waved it around in silent triumph before diving back into the glove compartment.

"It depends on what you want to do," Eurydice explained. "Opening someone to suggestion costs just a little, enthralling someone takes a little bit more plus a really good, hard screw, but remote control zombies? A metric fuckton. What's Dee doing?" Dee scribbled with his pen on the back of an old gas station receipt. "It looks like he's trying to tell us something. What is it, solid boy?"

Dee shoved the receipt in Eurydice's face. She read the back of the piece of paper, and passed it to Ursula in stunned silence.

"'Don't objectify me'," Ursula read as Eurydice burst into giggles.

Eurydice made little, happy snerk! noises. "You left out the three exclamation points."

Ursula peered up at Dee's silent, wounded-puppy expression. Her chin trembled, lips working to hold back laughter. "I'm s-sorry, Dee. But…" She held up the little slip of paper. "But this is just so cute."

Eurydice plopped sideways into Ursula's lap, hooting. Ursula's composure cracked and she laughed right into Dee's face.

"So zombifying three girls would take a shit-load of nanomek," Yves said. He eyed the sorority house.

"Yeah," Eurydice chuckled, her head propped on Ursula's knees.

"How about three dozen?" Yves asked, his voice cool and steady.

Ursula looked up and out. Her mirth died in her throat. Dee turned to sit face forward, moaned in wordless dejection, and hid his head in his hands. Eurydice rolled upright and yelped. "Gah! Where the fuck did they come from?"

The sorority house porch was packed with girls. The crowd spilled down the porch steps and ringed the horseshoe driveway, evenly spaced as if posed for a yearbook photograph, with the original trio, dripping and foamy, serving as a vanguard. The sisters of Epsilon Zeta stood at attention in various clubbing outfits, curve-hugging bellyshirts, and low-rise jeans, all staring at the passenger side of the Jeep with the blank, empty intensity of a camera lens.

"Holy shit," Eurydice said after she took the whole scene in, "that's a lot of skank-bots."

"There are probably several dozen more," Yves said, scanning the building's windows for other signs of life. "Reserves. These are just the ones Cherry Cupcake thinks will make the biggest impression on Dee. I mean, look at them. They could all be featured in a Girls Gone Wild video."

"They're just standing there, waiting," Ursula said, eyes wide. "And everything's so quiet. I feel like we're in a Hitchcock movie."

"There's just one thing I don't get," Yves said, scratching his smooth chin.

"Just one?" Ursula cried.

Yves pondered aloud. "Cherry Cupcake's blown so much nanomek without attacking, without even making an appearance. She's just being cute—well, psycho-bitch cute—playing around. But she knows she's going to need even more nanomek if she and Dee face off again, and that's what she wants most of all: Dee versus Cherry Cupcake, round two."

"Electric boogaloo," Eurydice mumbled.

Dee scrabbled about, gathering more receipts.

"I hate it when he does this," Ursula told Eurydice. "Get to the point, Yves."

"Where's she planning to get it all?" Yves said. "How? Jump the mailman? Send her skank-bots to knock over a fertility clinic?"

Dee wrote with stabbing furious strokes on a receipt. He gave the message to Yves who read it and passed it around.

PARTY

"She had a party," Yves said, dubious.

Dee threw another receipt at Yves.

TONIGHT

"She's going to have a party," Ursula said, uncomprehending.

"Oh, for God's sake," Dee spat, making everyone in the Jeep jump. The mob of girls pitched forward with every word. "I met those Easies yesterday and they said that they were holding a big party Friday night, and that's tonight—"

Eurydice's arm shot forward, stretching across the length of the Jeep's cabin. Her hand clamped down over Dee's mouth. "That's enough, dear. Cherry Cupcake knows that you know that she knows about the party now. Please stop making the zombie horde horny."

The sidewalk fronting the sorority house lawn swarmed with coeds. The vanguard trio and a half-dozen other girls perched on the curb. The redhead ran her tongue over her teeth. A blob of soap suds fell from her chin onto the hood of the Jeep.

"Do you have the air condition vents open, Yves?" Ursula asked. A girl in pink hot pants panted great wet gulps of air by Ursula's window.

Yves checked the dashboard dials. "Yes."

A spreading patch of moisture darkened the crotch of the pink pants outside her window as Ursula said, "Would you set the AC to recirculation, please."

"Yeah," Eurydice piped up, her head bobbing in time with the blonde coed's heaving, tee-shirt plastered chest, "or in about 30 seconds this whole car is going to reek of skank-bot pussy and…" Her brow crinkled in confusion. "…Tollhouse cookies?"

Yves slammed the vent toggle shut and turned the air conditioner on full blast.

"This feels like the last possible moment to me," Ursula said, checking her seat belt.

Dee shook his head and passed around another note.

MONOLOGUE

"What the heck does that mean?" Eurydice asked.

Yves tried to scope out the sorority house through the throng of coeds. "We're waiting for Cherry Cupcake to make her appearance and gloat. Hopefully she'll tell us her grand plan or something."

"That doesn't happen in real life," Ursula insisted.

"No," Yves replied, "but Cherry Cupcake isn't a real person."

Eurydice kicked the back of the driver seat. "Watch it, samurai."

"Not like that," Yves told her via her grumpy reflection in the rear view mirror. "I mean she's detached from reality. She doesn't want real life, she wants the story. What about you, Eurydice?"

Eurydice said nothing and Dee wrote a new note.

WTF?

"Later, Dee," Eurydice whispered. "I promise. At least until after the psycho ex-girlfriend gives her monologue." A winged shadow passed over the Jeep. Eurydice eyed the sky. "And here she comes, flying in right on schedule."

Yves blanched. "Oh, fuck."

"Wha—" Eurydice started, but leapt out of her seat as Dee cried, "Go!"

There was a knocking clamor of a dozen pairs of hands slapping against the Jeep as the mass of coeds surged forward. Dee exchanged a nod with Yves, then punched out the passenger window with an almost effortless backhanded swing.

"What the Hell?" Ursula cried.

A multitude of hands pushed their way into the Jeep, heedless of the broken glass, to tug at Dee's collar, yank on his hair, and feel up his pectorals.

"We're getting out of here," Yves announced.

Dee leaned out through the window. Arms scrambled over his shoulders, urging him farther out. The redhead's lips descended over Dee's mouth with a vacant but bottomless hunger.

Eurydice panicked as the thumping and drumming of arms and bodies against the Jeep grew louder and harder. "Oh my God, ohmygod."

Yves jammed two gobs of beeswax into his ears. "Now."

Dee broke the zombie kiss, turned his head and shouted.

"Get off."

A guttural groan resounded from many throats. The redhead's eyes rolled over white. She fell backward a few paces before she toppled over. All around the Jeep, girls followed suit, zombies attempting to tap-dance and landing on their asses.

Dee craned his neck. "You've got a path. No idea how long it'll last."

Yves took his foot off the brake and the Jeep rolled backward as Dee shouted directions. "Keep it straight, keep it straight. Okay, clear, turn around." The Jeep performed a quick K-turn in the mouth of the cul-de-sac. "Now floor it!"

Eurydice trembled and shook. "What. Why. What."

"Next time you two boys plan an escape," Ursula said as the Jeep sped down the side-road, "you damn well better let us in on it."

Dee buckled himself in. "It's not over. Left, go left. We need to head for the highway, south."

Yves ran a red light.

"What happened to staying for the monologue?" Eurydice demanded.

"There wasn't going to be one," Dee said. He kept watching the skies. "This isn't her style, but I guess she wanted to surprise us, instead."

"But Cherry Cupcake…"

"Weighs in at over three hundred pounds of cherry-chocolate flavored wet cement," Yves interrupted. "There's no way she can fly with those wings. She can only fall with style."

"So it wasn't Cherry Cupcake," Dee said, "but something else." The shadow fell over the Jeep again. "Drive faster, Yves."

* * *

My heart had a problem, in the early hours,
So I stopped it dead for a beat or two.
But I cut some cord, and I shouldn't've done that,
And it won't forgive me after all these years.
So I sent it to a place in the middle of nowhere
With a big black horse and a cherry tree.
Now it won't come back, 'cause it's oh so happy,
And now I've got a hole for the world to see.

—KT Tunstall, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree

* * *