“Yes, him. Taken up there like most of Earth’s population.” He jerked the spoon in the ceiling direction. “Couldn’t save himself, or so we heard. Rumors. Gossip. There’s not much left of hard evidence after the mess of those end times.”
“End times mean the end of the world.Thisisnotthat.” She waved her own spoon vaguely about.
So certain? “I suppose not.” Not yet. He shifted his back to get more comfortable, tossed the rubbish over the edge just to hear it bang and clatter as it bounced off the walkways below. “Okay. The tribes are the label that all of us who have contact have settled on. We still have a few short-wave radio comms. They can skip a message right round the world if we try hard and tell the other tribes to pass it on. So we know a bit about each other. Small groups in their hundreds, with a few in the thousands, are what make up the tribes. We each picked a name based on our building quarters. Makes us feel at home.”
He shrugged at her sound of disbelief. It was true.
“Look at it this way. Buildings are what we had left, to scavenge in, live in, hide in. Miles and miles and fucking miles of them, all empty, except for the ghosts.” She frowned at him. “Joking. No ghosts. Go out into the few large land reserves, or onto the piles of mostly radioactive rubble and you doom yourself. The GLs seem to zoom in on those and pick up strays, take them up to the top. The Lure is strong where there is nothing to insulate you.”
“Hide and hope the Ghoul Lords leave you alone, there’s nothing else?”
“We tried and we died, the first year or two after we were made. The top floor, the Lure grabs us too, and they make us dead so fast.” He’d barely escaped the carnage, had been lucky and fallen, had flown away. “Corpse heaven, up there.”
“And humans? You said some survived with you?” She threw her own garbage past the edge, and they paused to listen to the bangs then the prolonged silence that followed.
“No squeaky rats today.” Sometimes he heard them.
“I remember rats.”
He shot her a look. Funny thing to say. Until he recalled her memories were mostly toast.
“You asked about humans. Here’s what has become of them. We chain them up or hobble them… if they need it.”
“That’s fucking drastic. Jeez. Horrible.” Cyn pushed to her feet and went to the railing, peered down, giving him yet another opportunity to see her gorgeous ass. The tan leggings glued to every dip, crease, crevice and curve.
He’d never knock back that view. Had an urge to walk up and drag them down past where the butt cheeks merged with her thighs. And that led to heaven between her legs. He clenched his jaw, feeling the rising thunderbeat of unnatural lust that all beasters suffered.
Not me.
Vargr grinned at his own morality in this most uncouth of times but drew his legs up to hide his hard-on.
She turned to face him, leaning her back and arms against the stainless steel. “Okay. Tell me why.”
“Even on the very lowest stories, the Lure gets humans in daylight. Higher up, more so, but we’re never sure who will start clawing past everyone to climb. Some of them get violent and kill. Only one partial cure for it and not all opt in. So, we hobble.”A few were opted into the cure just because a beaster took a fancy to her, or him. “Sex with us temporarily lessens the effect of the Lure.”
“Seriously? Sex? How?”
“The biotechies did studies. They see into blood.” Which he still found crazy. “The little nanite critters in our blood are in our come too. An STD for the ages. Our jizz nanites circulate in humans after sex. It cures the Lure until the human immune system kills the nanites. There’s a way to make the effect last longer, and that’s by fucking a human who is very Lure-affected. It creates some sort of mental and physical bond.”
More to the point, it made it impossible for the human to actually fuck any other beaster, or the beaster any other human. Though a lot of distant lusting still went on. The bond went both ways. There’d been a lot of deliberate claiming of attractive nubile females. He’d steered clear of that. Seemed wrong, somehow.
There were pros and cons, he understood that. Just, seemed wrong.
“Why can’t you inject humans with your blood? Intravenously. Wasn’t that how you were given it?”
“So you do remember some of your past?”
“Odd bits, yes. Facts come to me more than things I’ve done.”
“It was how we got them, but we don’t have the know-how. It’s not simple. We were given other drugs too. There are some medics and a few doctors across the world, but no one who understands nanomachines. An injection of pure beaster blood, into their veins, makes humans dead.”
“Damn.” She sucked in her lower lip, chewed. “You’d need to cross-match, or maybe extract a plain culture of nanomachines. Or both?Andyou took drugs? I suppose you’ve had years to think about it.”
That sounded so very science-y. “We have, yes. I’m not sure every human wants to be one of us, either. You know? Do you remember what work you used to do, Cyn?” She shook her head. It might come back to her. “You’re the only new person who’s arrived at the tribe for about three years. Everyone is either up there, with us, or dead.”
“Crap. I know it’s true but crap.”
“Yeah. Hard to take in.”
