Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four,Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five
Part Twenty-Six
Ernest's shirt snagged on the rough bark of the tree, and the fit of the garment changed as a hole opened at his shoulder blade. The sleeves were gone and the hem was tattered. Will's clothes were looking just as frayed. PODless travel was rough on fabric.
Ernest followed a run in the material of Will's T-shirt with his fingertip. Will caught Ernest's hand, and slipped the finger into his mouth.
Teeth, tongue, shocking wet heat…Ernest almost jerked back, but he caught himself just in time and forced himself not to. Will smiled and bared his teeth around Ernest's finger, then flicked his tongue across the rounded curve of the pad. Then he flipped Ernest's hand back and pressed his mouth into the palm, and when he spoke, the words sent a shiver straight up Ernest's arm and right down his spine. "How's that feel? Dirty?"
"Yes." Ernest could hardly find his voice. It came out as little more than a breath.
Will let go of Ernest's wrist and began unfastening Ernest's trousers with urgent tugs at the waistband. Ernest found himself mirroring Will's actions, scrabbling to expose more of him to touch. "You let me feel…your teeth."
"I'd let you feel anything you wanted." Ernest's trousers dropped to his knees. His cock jutted at Will, and they hadn't even started working it yet. Ernest's bandaged arm was still clumsy, and Will slipped his hand beneath Ernest's and finished undoing the waistband himself. His cock was hard too. He flexed his knees to line them both up and stroke them together in one hand while Ernest watched, fascinated.
"We have to hurry," Will said. "Otherwise they'll think we're always slacking off whenever we're alone."
"I'd say we're the opposite of slack."
Will laughed, but his breath caught as his hand stroked their cocks, hard and fast.
Ernest pressed his forehead to Will's, but kept his eyes on the sight of their ruddy cockheads jutting and sinking in Will's grasp. "It's really hard."
"I know. Isn't it great? Good riddance to that shunt. You never would've ogled me like that if your shunt was still sucking the life out of you."
The perfectly wonderful hardness flagged for a moment and Ernest caught sight of his mottled arm beneath the clear coat. "But it looks so hideous—"
Will shut Ernest up with a harsh kiss that made their teeth clatter together. Ernest tasted copper where his lip had been nicked. The shock was enough to make him forget all about his freakish, shuntless arm.
Then Will started pulling at their cocks even harder. The speed and pressure were dizzying, and Ernest felt his arousal not only return, but spike.
Will's tongue trailed over Ernest's cheek and danced at his earlobe. It darted into his ear—mostly, though the tiny audio interface gave a faint cheep of feedback when Will licked it. Undeterred, Will ran his tongue down Ernest's neck, which sent multiple courses of shivers through him, then shifted his grip so he could keep stroking himself while he knelt and took Ernest's cock into his mouth.
Dirty. The thought of it spiked Ernest's arousal higher still, while the feel, the glorious, slippery, wet feel of teeth and tongue and hot sucking mouth wrenched a startled cry from him. He clutched at the rough bark and pressed his shoulders into the tree hard as he struggled to keep still, when all he wanted to do was scream and flail.
And then the give, as that internal switch flipped and the moment of heady release surged through Ernest, followed fast by a helpless pulsing, and soon a wash of dizzying languor.
Will stood. He cupped Ernest's genitals while he gave his own a few dozen more fast strokes, and shot his come on Ernest's saliva-slicked cock. He stroked the newly slippery flesh, and Ernest grit his teeth and dug his fingers into the tree at the startling sensitivity—but Will stopped stroking before Ernest could determine whether he would have been able to tolerate the touches long enough to orgasm again.
Will kissed Ernest. His lips were sticky, and salty-sweet. He nuzzled his forehead into Ernest's hair, shuddered, and kept Ernest pinned to the tree, thigh to thigh and chest to chest, while he caught his breath.
"You went soft for a second, there," he said casually. "What was it, did I do something that didn't feel good? You can tell me, you know. I won't be offended—I'll just try harder next time."
"You? I like everything you do. Look at how fast I, um…."
"Came."
"Yes."
"You sure? Remember, I'm fluent in body language." What a bizarre idiom, body language. Ernest loved it. "You need to tell me if the way I'm touching you, or stroking you, or kissing you, doesn't trip your trigger. Because next time I rock your world, I want to make you howl."
Ernest had no doubt Will could, if he'd set his mind to it. In fact, he wasn't even sure what Will was getting at. "I was hard before you even touched me. Just from watching you move."
"Yeah?" Will butted his crotch against Ernest's and gave it a playful grind. "Go on."
"I associate you with the things you've done to me, and now even the sight of you makes me, I don't know the word."
"Hot."
"No, that's not it. I mean it makes me want to play at porn. And hungry. But not in my arm."
"Yep, that's it. Idiom."
Ernest tried the word. "Hot." He supposed it was no stranger than dirty. "You know the best sayings." He stared into Will's eyes, the color of dusty grass, with a corona of gold around the pupil, and ran a thumb over his lean jaw, and wondered how it had ever seemed that Will's shunt needed tweaking because it was clearly malnourishing him…but then Ernest glimpsed his own mottled forearm and cringed.
Will's gaze followed. "It's that. Isn't it? That's what you were talking about when you started to droop. You weren't just pointing it out 'cos you were fishing for compliments."
Ernest tucked his arm behind him. "Why would I point it out? It's disgusting."
"Don't ever say that. You're beautiful. Everything about you. Even that arm. Especially that arm. You ripped your shunt loose digging your way out of the Deaconate with that arm, and you came back to me." He grabbed Ernest's wrist with startling ease—he had a longer reach, and he was stronger, and uninjured as well—and he clasped the arm to his chest, mottled clear-coat and all. He pressed his lips to Ernest's knuckles and said, "I love this arm."
Will captured Ernest's gaze and gave him a meaningful look (although the exact meaning may have eluded Ernest), then he gently pressed his lips to the gruesome clear coat bandage, and kissed it. "I love you."
Ernest turned the phrase around in his head. How profound in its simplicity.
"And I really wish we were still on-grid so I could play back the look you've got on your face right now. People say 'I love you' all the time in contraband feeds—it even has its own euphemism, those three little words." Will released Ernest's arm and kissed him on the forehead. "But we can't just stand around and analyze it to death. We really do need to finish scouting and get back to camp."
The railroad was packed and ready to be powered up by the time they returned, walking the last half-kilometer to bring their breathing and heart rates down to normal. "Get in," Abraham told Benjamin, nodding toward the main car. Benjamin did as he was told. Ernest supposed that sort of obedience had been drilled into him.
Everyone took position. Abraham started the engine, and the railroad began to move.
They took turns watching for obstructions through the hole Audrey had cut until it became too dark to see, and then Abraham slowed the railroad's pace dramatically so the impact wouldn't be too jarring if they did encounter another fallen tree.
The slow coast felt more natural, more like POD travel, and Ernest curled up against Will and, though he wished he was properly vertical and shunted, managed to doze.
"I wonder how far the tracks go," Audrey said dreamily.
Ernest's eyelids fluttered open. The gently gliding car was quiescent, save for the hypnotic drone of the propulsion and the occasional creak of the sideways lid.
Audrey stood at the hole with her face pressed against the side of the bin and both hands splayed palm-out next to her ears and her hair floating in a fuchsia halo. "Why do you suppose old-time people wanted to travel into the woods, anyway? Were they looking for metal? Or minerals? Or…what?"
Ernest raised his head and Will rolled out from under it and shifted onto his side. He was accustomed to sleeping any which way, and was usually contorted in some bizarre position or another when Ernest woke up and found him. "What makes you think they were looking for something?" Ernest asked softly.
"Isn't that what everything was all about back then? Locating resources and consuming them as quickly as possible?"
Was it? Ernest supposed he had been taught as much, but with those "three little words" edited out of the version he'd known all these years, how much of his knowledge had actually been based in fact? "Hypothesize that they weren't looking for something to consume. What other reason would anyone want to travel into the woods?"
Audrey turned and grinned at Ernest. "What an odd game. Okay, let me think…maybe they wanted to see trees."
"Or animals."
"Or animals," she repeated. "Or maybe they wanted to get out of those creepy right-angle houses they lived in."
"Or maybe they'd been doing their jobs for so long they just wanted to do something…different."
"Like that feed you memorized."
"Camping. Yes."
"Now what was the whole purpose of camping?"
"It was a sort of self-initiated challenge, to walk through the woods and eat things without getting poisoned."
"Totally blasphemous," Audrey giggled. "I'll have to watch that feed myself." She pulled the laser from her gear belt and cut a small, round hole beside the one she was peering through, but several centimeters higher, and poked the fiberglass circle out with her fingertip. "Come watch the tracks with me—sometimes you can see a little bit by the moonlight." She patted the wall beneath the higher circle. "It's good to talk to you. I miss Charlie."
"I miss Louise." And though it saddened Ernest to admit it, he said, "And you're much better at conversation than she ever could have been."
"Thanks. But if we'd met sooner, I could've showed you how to unlock her safeguards. Add in a little randomness routine, and it would've been a pretty good approximation."
"I'm coming to realize…and accept…that Louise was actually quite limited."
"I dunno, I think you hacked together a pretty cool combo of mods, especially since you were more of a data specialist than a software coder."
The railroad was moving slowly enough that the air current at the hole did nothing more alarming than make Ernest's eye feel dry, which was resolved by a few extra blinks. After a long stretch of watching tracks skim by in the moonlight, Audrey said, "Maybe we can play with some programming after I figure out a way to pull another audio interface together. I'll bet you'd make a great mod."
"I guess we could try." Not that Ernest saw much point in it, not without L0U15E, but he supposed any skill that made him more useful to the group might be advantageous to learn.
The train coasted through a web of thin, brittle branches like bony fingers that scratched along the length of the bin, but didn't slow its progress. "We're already past the section Will and I cleared," Ernest said. He blinked away dryness and pressed his eye to the hole. "This is totally unfamiliar."
"It looks blue. I suppose it's not really blue. Maybe it's a trick of the light."
Ernest blinked hard and tried to discern what the colors would look like in daylight. Down the tracks, where they seemed to get smaller and closer together but never actually did, the blue tint was even more pronounced.
"Do you think my hair would look good that color?" Audrey wondered.
"How can you mod your hair without anything to shunt into?"
"I'm sure I could figure out some…."
"Audrey?"
She'd stopped speaking so she could press her eye hard against the hole. Ernest did the same, and found the bluish light was even brighter now, and in that bright blue moonlight, he could see. The screen of trees on either side of the tracks diminished, and a vast open space spread before them. Jutting from the vast landscape was a series of crumbling right angles.
And the railroad was heading right for it.
COPYRIGHT 2010 JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORIZED USE, DUPLICATION AND/OR DISTRIBUTION OF THIS MATERIAL WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
The final version of Zero Hour is now in ebook, including 6 interior illustrations by Jordan and a gorgeous cover by PL Nunn. Buy Zero Hour at JCP Books
Dont miss the next serialized story, Magic Mansion. Sign up for JCP News and you'll know as soon as it's posted!