“Abner won’t. He has this thing about not fucking children.”
“So I have discovered. But I’m not a child, just young. I made him hard, but I didn’t make him try to get into me. He’s strong. I think he really would have raped me with that poker if I hurt his child. I admire that. But this is more. I want him to want me. I want him to possess me. I want him to—to love me.”
“That’s the hell of it,” Nefer said. “He won’t. He hates sopaths, and usually kills them. He loves Bunty, and she’s the only one he’ll fuck, and if anyone touches her or the children he’ll kill them. I’ve worked with him; I know. Love is like a magic spell cast over you that you can’t fight. You don’t even want to fight it. You just want to be with him and do anything he wants you to, knowing you’ll never get any more than the satisfaction of pleasing him.”
“That is weird.” Autopsy shook her head. “But true. It’s the way the men are with me. I wanted to get close to him the moment I saw him.”
“Yep,” Nefer agreed. “You thought you were seducing him, but he was seducing you, not for sex, but for love, which is worse. And that’s why I made him let you go. Now you’re his captive, his love slave, same as me, and if there’s any way you can be useful, you’ll do it. You must know a lot about this place. Maybe you’ll help us complete our mission.”
Nefer smiled. “For that, maybe he just might fuck you, if Bunty tells him to. Just as he’d fuck me, if she told him to. It’s a faint hope, but it’s all there is.”
Autopsy glanced at Bunty, who nodded.
“Weird,” Autopsy repeated. She seemed to be in a partial daze, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar emotion. For the first time in her life she wanted to give rather than to take. It was contrary to her sopath nature.
Nefer had done Abner the favor of clarifying Autopsy’s newfound loyalty to him. It was time for him to take over. He held Dreda close and spoke over her head. “Autopsy, I am leaving you in command of Sauerkraut, under me,” he said. “I could have killed you at any time, or shelled the house, but wanted to play out the scene. Are you satisfied that your choices are to obey me and live, or oppose me and die?”
“Not entirely, because if it weren’t for this emotion, this love, I could get rid of you soon enough. This is my town. But I do want to fuck you, and to make you like me. Give me that, and I’ll do what else you say, no limits, as she says.”
Abner answered cautiously, aware that this extremely attractive sopath was now dangerous in other than a purely physical way. When he saw her torturing Dreda he hated her, but now she was on his side. Nefer had slowly gotten him to like her, and Autopsy was apt to do the same despite his knowledge of her vicious nature. “Not at this time. You will have to satisfy me that you are sufficiently useful for my purpose. That may take time.”
“See?” Nefer said. “He’s playing you as he plays me, and you know it, but all you can do is beg for more.”
Autopsy nodded. “Just let me be close to you, Abner. I’m not used to this, but I’m a quick study.”
She surely was, to have survived and achieved power as a teen. She had made expert use of her power over men. “I want your full effort to fathom the mystery of these two towns,” he said. “To figure out why the one has no sopath births while the other has mostly sopath births. If we can get that answer, I will probably depart and leave you here as you were, giving you what you want.”
“I don’t want it anymore,” Autopsy said. “I want to go with you, as Nefer does.” She smiled with a suggestion of humor. “To be your love slave.” She glanced at Bunty. “Your concubine, for when your wife’s not in the mood. I am always in the mood.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“Or have you stay here, and work with you. Just so long as it’s close to you.”
Abner was surprised. “That might be possible, depending on what we discover. We do need a new place to settle.”
“I’ll try as hard as I possibly can,” Autopsy promised. “Anything I know, anything I can get for you, it’s yours.”
“That should suffice.”
“Kiss her,” Nefer advised, satisfied with the way of it. “To seal the deal.”
Abner glanced at Bunty, who nodded again. So he took Autopsy in his arms and kissed her on the lips. He felt her melting. He had indeed made another conquest.
She remained infernally tempting. How long would he be able to hold out against her seduction?
After that they all dressed and adjourned to more comfortable quarters. The guards were gone, food was served, and Autopsy was resplendent in a more modest dress that hardly masked her beauty. She looked like the world’s loveliest Girl Back Home. It was hard to believe that she had sat naked on his lap while fondling his penis, or that she had ordered Dreda tortured. Dreda, however, refused to look at her. Her second brush with a hostile sopath had not been any more pleasant than her first.
“I am convinced that the secret is hiding in plain sight,” Abner said. “Maybe if we review the history of the two towns we’ll happen upon it.” He looked at Autopsy. “You must have been close to the first sopath born here. I am not inquiring into your personal history, merely the larger situation. When did the sopaths start?”
“I could have been the first,” she agreed. “My family was the first to move here after the fruities left, and I was born soon after.”
“Fruities?”
“The cult freaks. Their canon was to be fruitful and multiply, like in the Bible, and did they ever! I think they just liked to fuck. They thought nothing of having ten or twelve children in a family. Their women were almost continuously pregnant, including the single ones.”
“Then they left,” Bunty said. “Somewhat abruptly, I understand. Why?”
“No one knows. They seemed to be doing great, then suddenly they moved far far away, leaving their houses empty. Something must’ve scared them off, like a toxic nuclear waste dump buried under the town, poisoning everything. Except it wasn’t. My folks checked that out, before I ditched them. No waste, no radiation. The environment was fine, and nobody since has suffered any problems. The town’s clean, except for the sopaths.”
“Much of it looked deserted as we drove in,” Abner said. “Empty houses, fallow fields, as if a blight struck it.
Autopsy laughed. “That was us. The sopaths. We did so much damage that folk started moving out as fast as they had moved in. So now we’re trying to get more settlers in, especially responsible older soulers, but they’re wary. I could persuade the men, but their wives won’t let them be within a hundred miles of here. So there’s just not enough people here.”
“While there are plenty in Sweetpea,” Bunty said. “And work for visiting sopaths too.”
“We need the money. We put the fear of hell into any soaps we send there, so they behave. Anything the Sweets want, we’ll provide if we can, for cash.”
Soap? A nickname for sopath. Abner knew the children would pick right up on it.
“So we understand,” Bunty said. “Including child prostitutes.”
“Sure. Why not? There’s a market.”
“The question is,” Abner reminded them, “why the disparity in sopath births. How do the two towns differ?”
Autopsy shrugged. “Got me. They had that slaughter, then nothing.”
Something jogged Abner’s mind. “Kraut had huge families, while Sweet had half its population wiped out a few years later. Is there a connection?”
“The fruities,” Clark said. “Did they have sopaths?”
“Dunno,” Autopsy said. “I hear they were close-mouthed about personal things.”
“It was really before the time of the sopaths,” Abner said. “You’re the oldest sopath we have encountered.”
“This just seems to be the place for us,” Autopsy agreed.
“I wonder,” Bunty said. “Abner, you mused on whether there could be a connection between Sweetpea’s tragedy and Sauerkraut’s fertile cultists. The one town had a serious loss of population, wh
ile the other was rapidly gaining. Could Kraut have simply run out of available souls?”
“More would have been drawn in from elsewhere,” Abner said.
“Are we sure of that? How long does it take for souls to find their hosts? Maybe it’s not instantaneous.”
“I’m not clear what you’re getting at.”
“Are souls like little clouds?” Clark asked. “Drifting?”
That made it come together for Abner. “A soul without a host—how does it travel? It has no legs or wings, I think.”
“Clouds go where the wind goes,” Clark said. “I’ve watched them.”
“And what wind moves spirits without substance?” Bunty asked.
It was coming together. “They could simply remain where they are, where people died and left them,” Abner said. “Maybe spreading out a bit, but not moving far. So where many people die, like in a hospital, there could be many souls.”
“Many births occur in hospitals,” Bunty said. “Probably more than deaths. No surplus of souls there.”
“Sweetpea!” Clark said. “Half the people died! Big pile of souls!”
“And Sauerkraut,” Bunty said. “Where the fruities used up all the souls.”
“The bastards!” Autopsy swore. “I was born in a damn vacuum!”
“While if your folks had moved to Sweetpea, you’d have had a soul,” Clark said, pleased with himself for discovering it.
“I believe we’ve got it,” Abner said. “The locality of souls. Where we lived it was residential, with a good birth rate and the few who died moved first to retirement communities elsewhere. So we had an increasing number of sopaths.”
“If I had known,” Bunty said soberly, “I’d have visited a retirement community to give birth.”
“But you know, it won’t last,” Abner said. “Soon enough those extra souls in Sweetpea will be used up, and then they’ll be just like other places.”
“So we have a formidable insight,” Bunty agreed. “But not a solution.”
“That comes next,” Abner said.
CHAPTER 9
They pondered it the next few hours. Autopsy turned out to be a good hostess, having accepted the new reality, and they had an excellent hotel suite. They were sure it was bugged, but didn’t care.
“It’s only because she loves you, father,” Nefer said as they relaxed before the TV in the evening. “She wants you to be pleased with her, and to stay here. She knows she can’t stop you from leaving, and that you’re not going to take her into your family the way you did me, and anyway, she’d lose her base if she left here. She has to fuck those men regularly or they’ll start getting restive.” What she said seemed true, but her use of the term father signaled that it was false. She thought Autopsy was faking her conversion. Abner agreed. They had handled only the first round of their encounter.
“That makes me wonder, Abner,” Bunty said. “She said she has had sex with all the local men, and we have no reason to doubt it, because it’s how she maintains control. So why isn’t she pregnant? She surely doesn’t use any contraceptives.” Again, what she said made sense, but she didn’t trust the situation.
“That’s right,” Abner agreed. “We know sopaths can get pregnant, because the ones that service Sweetpea men do. And what about VD? In any large group of men, that’s bound to exist.”
“Daddy, what’s veedee?” Dreda asked. Her horror of the morning was subsiding.
“The letters V D stand for venereal disease,” Abner said. “It’s a group of illnesses that spread sexually. Most are treatable, but none of them are things anyone wants to have. It’s a practical reason for not having careless sex.”
“I’ll remember,” she promised.
“So if Topsy has sex with a lot of men, she should get pregnant or VD?” Clark asked. He had a natural curiosity about things, especially the supposedly naughty secrets.
“That’s it,” Abner agreed. “But she doesn’t seem to have had any trouble. Either she’s quite lucky, or she’s more careful than she suggests.”
“She’s a sopath,” Nefer said. “She won’t be careful. I’m not.”
“You’re too young to get pregnant, and have been lucky to avoid VD,” Abner said. “Your activity has been more limited. You’ve had sex with what, ten boys and men? She’s had sex with hundreds.”
“I guess you’re right. She should be knocked up or sick, and she isn’t.”
“Which may relate to our answer,” Bunty said. “If souls are local, then anyone living in a soul-poor area needs to prevent pregnancy, to avoid getting a sopath. They need good contraception.”
“That’s right,” Abner said. “We don’t need to control the global population, just bring the birthrate down to the level where souls are available. Especially in areas like this. Contraception can solve the sopath problem.”
“Contraception could have solved the population problem long ago,” Bunty said. “But too many people are like sopaths in that respect: they simply don’t bother. And try to persuade the major religions to preach contraception!”
“Which side are the religions really serving?” Nefer asked. “God or Satan? Not that I care, but I’m curious.”
They smiled, knowing it was a joke.
“We’re back with that problem,” Abner said. “We know how to solve the sopath challenge, but we can’t implement it because of religion, carelessness, and ignorance.”
“Unless there’s a way to have safe sex that those things won’t stop,” Bunty said. “This is probably a blind alley, but let’s ask Autopsy what her secret is.”
“She’ll say ‘Fuck me, Abner, and I’ll tell you,’” Nefer said, smiling. “I would.”
“Will she settle for holding my hand?”
“She’d rather hold your cock.” The others had to smile, appreciating the reference.
“I’ll offer my hand,” Abner said.
When it was time to sleep, Abner murmured “The watch continues.”
They all knew what that meant. He did not trust Autopsy despite her seeming conversion. She was probably faking it. She surely did love Abner, now, but that did not necessarily mean she accepted his family in the way Nefer did. Autopsy was older, and accustomed to having her own way. It was more likely that she would be scheming to eliminate the family so she could have Abner for herself. Because she knew Abner stood by his family, and probably meant the formidable threat he had made on Dreda’s behalf, Autopsy was being cautious. She would be looking for a way to get rid of them without implicating herself. Then, by her reckoning, Abner would have no choice but to take what was offered: repeated raw sex with the sopath.
“Do we have to, father?” Nefer asked. “We’re safe here, aren’t we, under Autopsy’s protection?” She was lying, meaning the opposite, as her continuing use of the term indicated.
“It’s good discipline,” Abner said. “We won’t always be in a protected situation. We need to stay in practice.”
“We understand, father,” Clark said. “It’s a pain, but we’ll do it.”
“A pain, father,” Dreda agreed. They were all on board, understanding that they remained in danger.
Nefer took the first watch, walking from room to room in the suite, checking frequently on everyone. Meanwhile Abner and Bunty, pretending assurance of their privacy, made enthusiastic love. Nefer, on her rounds, looked in on them, and nodded; what Autopsy viewed in her film would make her jealous as hell, if she were capable of jealousy.
Then Bunty took her turn on guard, and Nefer lay down beside Abner and took his hand. Again, Autopsy should be jealous, perhaps not of the hand holding specifically, but of Nefer’s freedom to lie beside him and touch him as he slept. Nefer was a sopath, and they all knew it, yet she had this privilege. It meant, among other things, that Abner could get friendly with a known sopath, if he trusted her. Autopsy would be pondering that.
The others, including Abner, took their turns. Thus they passed the night in a routine that signified their caution despite
their words. That, too, Autopsy would note and ponder.
In the morning they met with Autopsy again, in the dining room for a lavish breakfast. She was conservatively garbed, showing no private flesh, and her hair was bound back into a bun. “I’ll tell you right off, I don’t use anything when I fuck,” she said. “I have no trouble with VD or pregnancy. I’m immune.”
“Here is our reasoning,” Abner said, not pretending to be surprised. It was a kind of game they were playing, with moves and counter-moves having implications beyond their seeming simplicity. Autopsy was spying on them, and they knew it, and she knew they knew it. “If there’s something protective you use, it’s very effective. We need to know whether it would work on a global scale.”
“There really isn’t. Only—” She broke off, pondering.
“There is something,” Nefer said.
“It’s the grotto.” She did not seem to be lying; this was something important to her.
“The what?”
“I go there every day, because it gives me a high. Probably it has no connection, but I can show it to you if you want.”
She wanted to show them something. They needed to find out why. Sopaths as a class were not into incidental sightseeing. What was really on her mind? “We had better see it,” Abner said.
“Give me your hand. I’ll take you there.”
There was no further doubt she knew of their evening dialogue. She was implying that she would settle for hand holding, as Nefer did. But of course she would not. It had to be a ploy. “Take us there,” Abner said, proffering his hand.
Autopsy took it and led him outside. Her fingers massaged his fingers as they walked, with a surprisingly erotic effect. “It’s a couple miles away, in the hills. We should drive.”
They got into the motor home, and Abner drove while Autopsy sat up front and put her hand on his arm, subtly massaging it too. She really was settling for that, for now, perhaps considering it an avenue to greater intimacy. He remembered how she had massaged his penis.