Finally, he was sticking right up again and Gavin pulled at her pants and panties, shoving her down into the couch. She gasped as he climbed on her, as his thing finally got inside her to that tickly heat. She lay excited and nervous, wondering if this would be one of those times, as Gavin humped and humped at her.

His watch beeped.

“Oh fuck!” he groaned, but he didn’t stop. He was humping faster, rocking the whole couch, and that shivery feeling was growing. “Hurry up, hurry up!”

She giggled. There was nothing she could do about it. But her giggles became a gasp as it happened. That tiny little shiver crawled up to her belly and blossomed, making her glow all over, making her need to pee so much.

Then Gavin grunted in her ear and squeezed off another soapy spurt inside her. Gross. He was off her at once, fumbling his jeans up as he ran for the reel that needed changing.

Too late. Tammy saw the window to one of the auditoriums go white even as Gavin ran to it, which meant the reel had run out and the people in the audience (all six or eight of them) were even now looking around and getting honked off. It was just too bad if they wanted refunds, because the money was all locked up for the night.

“Ah fuck!” Gavin cried. He snatched up the new reel and then leaned in toward the auditorium window and dropped it again.

The canister banged like a gun and film came spitting out. Tammy jumped up with a cry of sympathetic dismay, but Gavin didn’t even seem to care. His mouth was moving, but he wasn’t saying anything. He stumbled back, his face washed out and staring.

“What’s wrong?” Tammy asked. She pulled her shirt shut and hugged herself small. “Gavin?”

“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fuck.” Gavin looked at her, his eyes huge. He was shaking. “Stay there.”

Tammy huddled on the couch, fear and confusion fighting for control of her. “What’s wrong?” she asked again. Her voice cracked on the second word.

“Just stay there, baby. Don’t move. Don’t…don’t make a sound, okay?” Gavin staggered across the projectionist’s bay to another screen. He leaned into the window, shading his eyes. “Jesus,” she heard him whisper. He reached out and slapped at the up-lights, flooding the auditorium with light even though the movie was still running. “Oh sweet baby Jesus.” His voice slid up shrill and unsteady. He looked a hundred years old.

Tammy felt herself get up without giving herself any conscious order to do so. She walked down the bay to Raiders of the Lost Ark on legs she couldn’t even feel.

On screen, Harrison Ford was frantically spraying cobras with gasoline and she couldn’t seen anything below but a few dozen people quietly watching from their seats. Then the scene changed to the desert, lighting up the place like a sun, and Tammy could see blood. Blood in rivers. Blood in falls. Blood painting the back of every chair where a person sat.

She waited to faint, but she didn’t. She didn’t think she could. She heard Gavin run across the bay and into the manager’s office, heard him rattling at the phone and then screaming into it. She couldn’t even wonder who he was calling. She couldn’t feel anything, not even fear.

So much blood.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tagen heard running feet in his dreams before the hammering at his door finished killing his sleep. He bolted up from the bed, grabbing his plasma gun and aiming it just as Daria burst in.

“We’ve got to go right now!” she told him, and then skidded to a stop and stared at the weapon in his hand.

The suddenness of her halt made him think for one horrible instant that he had fired. He uncurled his thumb from the killing switch with excruciating slowness and put the gun down. Only then did he breathe, folding forward and covering his face with his hands, breathing deep and slow until his heart had calmed.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I need to put that damned thing away somewhere.” He spoke against his palms, muffling the words, but then looked up at her. “What has happened?”

“Someone broke into a movie theater in Hillmark and killed every single person in the building,” she replied. “They’re not saying how, but they’re saying more than fifty people died.”

“At once?” Tagen pushed himself off the bed and grabbed for his clothing. “How? How could even E’Var do such a thing?” The idea that the prisoner might have acquired a neural stunner during his escape came to Tagen for the first time, freezing him in place. The pilots who manned prison transporters were not supposed to go armed—the best means of preventing prisoners from taking one’s weapons was still not to carry them—but it was a policy that had seen a lot of bending over the years, and even though the stunners were no good against a Jotan prisoner, they were just as effective against the occasional Kevrian raider as they were against humans. “Were they sleeping?” he asked cautiously.

“No, but…I don’t think you understand. Movie theaters are like buildings with huge TV screens in them,” Daria was saying. “They’re dark and noisy, and I think it’s completely plausible that he just went from person to person and killed them all without anyone even noticing. And even if someone did scream or something, he’d only have to wait until someone in the movie was screaming, too. You’ve seen some of our movies. There can be a lot of screaming.”

He shook his head, not refuting her but unable to accept her argument. “But how could he know that? How could he know even what a…movie theater…was?”

“I don’t know,” Daria said. “But I know Hillmark is only thirty miles from here. The TV says they only found the bodies an hour ago. Your guy might still be in the area.”

“And you will take me there?”

She blinked rapidly, seeming surprised. “Of course,” she said.

“You are not afraid?”

She laughed at him. “I’m terrified. Are you coming or not?”

Tagen stepped forward and pulled her against him, feeling her hands come up and grip at his back, feeling the tension in her small body. She was terrified. And she was still going with him. “Thank you,” he said, stroking down the soft fall of her hair. He squeezed her lightly and stood away, taking up his supply pack. “Lead me.”

She went ahead of him down the stairs and out the door. There she paused and came back. She moved past Tagen to the kitchen and brought down two tins of the cat’s food. Grendel was there at his dish in an instant, miawing anxiously as she filled it. She touched the animal’s head as he dove in, and then she came away again.

“Leave the door open, Tagen,” she said, as she moved past him and outside again. “Just in case, you know, I don’t come back. For a while.”

His brave human.

Tagen left the door ajar and followed her down the groundcar. She stared straight ahead as she strapped herself down and her eyes were dry. In her face, he saw the looming possibility of danger, of death, but he also saw a determination to face it.

“I could not do this without you,” Tagen said as she ignited the engine. It hurt him to admit it, but it was truth and truth was all he had to give her in exchange for what she did now. “It is you, not I, who is saving your Earth.”

“I know I should care about that,” she said, pulling the car around and onto the path that led to the road. “But I don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person, not one, that I can honestly say I want to save. I’m sure they’re out there. I’m sure there’s millions of shiny happy people who deserve to be safe and happy for their whole lives, but I’ve never met them. I meet people like Traynor Polidori. That’s who I meet. And I don’t really want to think too hard about the fact that I’m saving them, if you don’t mind.”