CHAPTER 13: UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES

Envy, Douglass, and Rusty didn’t make it to the cabins that night because, when they were not chasing down a lone snowshoe hare that they had spotted leaving blazing white prints in the ash over by a patch of willows, Rusty was enthusiastically harnessing Douglass’s extrasensory sight to gather maggots to stuff in his duffel bag. The maggots’ jaws, they found as Rusty piled them in, were weak, almost vestigial, and didn’t seem capable of chewing through the canvas of the bag once Rusty deposited them there, nor did they seem useful in digging through the frozen dirt to escape the big man’s attempts to catch them.

Still, Envy and Douglass had both wanted to only catch a few of the creatures, to make sure they didn’t hold any other nasty surprises for them, before loading up on hundreds them. They mentioned as much. Repeatedly. Rusty, however, had other ideas.

“Best fire-starters on the planet,” Rusty said, cheerfully dropping another maggot in his bag, which he patted like an old friend. “Better than gasoline.”

“Hey Rusty,” Douglass said, nervously eying the bulging duffel full of maggots, “don’t you think you got enough, man? What is that, like ten pounds of them?”

Rusty snorted. “That’s like saying ain’t I got enough guns.”

So that’s what this was. Another my gun is cooler than your gun, my truck is louder than your truck, my TV is bigger than your TV dick-waving contest. It all made sense now.

“Hey, Rusty, what happened to face huggers and sinus parasites?” Envy ventured.

“These little babies are gonna keep us warm tonight,” Rusty said, finding another one. “And they can’t get out of the bag, so just unbunch ya’ll’s panties just a fucking moment and let me do my thing and keep us alive, okay?”

“What about huddling for warmth?” Douglass demanded. “I thought you were into redheads.” Envy raised a brow at him. If Douglass was willing to volunteer dickside, then he must be really nervous.

“I’m into having a five gallon bucket of kerosene,” Rusty said. “But, since you dumped that out on the ground to put out a fire, I’m gonna just make do with these little beauties.” He patted his bag proudly again, like a guy with a new pet that just did an amazing trick.

“They caught fire,” Douglass argued. “Your bag is made of canvass. Canvass catches fire.”

In reply, Rusty threw a maggot at Douglass, which landed in his lap. As it started to wriggle around atop his cock and balls, making the blind man scream, Rusty chuckled, “You tell me…that catching fire to you, Doug?”

“Fucker!” Douglass snapped, hurling the weakly-struggling alien pupae away from him, but sadly missing Rusty by about three miles. “You hairy dumb fuck!”

“Grow a pair, little man,” Rusty said, plucking the maggot from the snow and tossing it back in his bag. “Where’s the next one?”

“I’m not helping you find more, fuck off.”

Rusty shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He turned and began seeking out more, using his boot to swipe at the snow without Douglass’s input.

As Rusty wandered off, kicking up snow and churning the ash in a huge swath across the mountain, Envy sidled closer to Douglass. “What do you think I should do?”

Douglass was glaring in the general direction of Rusty’s back, red-faced and still breathing hard. “I don’t know. I can’t tell if that crazy fuck’s gonna get us killed or gonna keep us alive.”

“Maybe a little of both,” Envy said. A few dozen yards down the hillside, Rusty let out a triumphant sound and ducked to pick up another maggot.

“Shit,” Douglass muttered. Obviously he’d been banking on being Rusty’s only source of alien fire-maggots.

Rusty had collected hundreds of the creatures before darkness started to fall, at which point Rusty pulled a handful of them out with his fingers and proudly dropped them in the makeshift stone bowl they were using as their fireplace. “There ya go, ya panty-sniffing girly-girls.” He squished the maggots, one after another, then quickly backed away as the heat enveloped the area. “I give you fire,” he said, gesturing grandly.

“They’re trying to get out,” Envy noted, watching the sack of maggots nervously. It moved with the things inside, like a bag filled with snakes. “Do you have to keep that bag in here with us?”

“Could snow overnight,” Rusty said, like he didn’t care. “Don’t want to lose it.”

“At least put it on the other side of the camp,” Douglass grated. “I don’t want those things near my head when they escape and start wriggling up people’s noses.”

That seemed to get through to Rusty. He gave the bag of maggots a nervous glance. “You think they could get out?”

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“Yes,” Envy and Douglass said at the same time.

Rusty made a face, but he was still stubbornly unwilling to let his prizes out of his sight. After great deliberation, he stood and picked up the bag. “I’ll just put them over here, okay?” he said, setting them against the opposite snow wall.

Earlier in the day, when it had become clear that Rusty was going to keep looking for maggots with the neurotic efficiency of a dumbass Marine, Envy had built up a wall of snow around their stone ‘bowl’ to keep out the mountain breeze.

Now, the three of them got situated around the ‘bowl’ as it bubbled and turned red-hot from the four maggots Rusty squished. It was actually quite comfortable, and the ground that Envy had cleared of snow started to steam.

“Aaahhh,” Rusty said, propping his feet up. “That’s more like it.” He was grinning from ear to ear.

She could hear the rock bubbling in the bowl, but Envy was more concerned about the bag of aliens. They were making little squeals that were making her twitch.

“Oh chill out,” Rusty said. “You said yourself their jaws were too weak to do shit. They’re not goin’ nowhere. Relax. Smell the rabbit.” He had propped the snowshoe hare that he had snared with a little help from one of Envy’s bootstrings over the ‘fire,’ and already, the smell of roasting meat was making Envy’s guts clench with hunger.

One rabbit between the three of us, she thought, trying to squash her sudden desperation. They had actually seen three rabbits in that willow grove, but by nightfall, Rusty’s snares had only nabbed one of them.

Still, considering the current state of the world, she supposed a rabbit to split between them wasn’t so bad. At least they had something to eat at all. After seeing that twelve-hundred-foot wave hit the mountainside below her, Envy knew there were a lot of people in the world that were simply never going to eat again.

“The heat should last several hours,” Rusty said, spreading out on the middle of the blanket to soak up the warmth in that totally calm, casually manly way that screamed to the world he took full responsibility for their current state of comfort.

Envy narrowed her eyes, always having found that particular posture irritating, at best: The sign of a small mind, a smaller dick, or a fragile ego. Sometimes all three.

“I still don’t think we should be up here in the snow,” Douglass said, as Envy settled on blanket beside Rusty. “They can move around underneath us, take us by surprise if there’s snow.” They had ascertained that it was their wriggling motion, not the toothy jaws, that allowed them to locomote through the snow, leaving little tunnels reminiscent of mouse holes.

“Take us by surprise,” Rusty snorted, still confidently spread out as if he owned the mountain, sounding completely unconcerned. “What they gonna do, tickle us? Besides. You can see them.”

“Yeah,” Douglass replied to Rusty. “I can see them. You can’t.”

Rusty un-spread a little to sit up and frown at the doctor. “So?”

“So I have to sleep sometime.” Douglass cocked his head. “Or did you think I’d spend all night sitting up, watching over your precious bag of maggots as your hillbilly ass saws your way through sequoia with a six-foot rubber dildo?”

Rusty’s mouth opened in a little startled ‘Oh’, making it clear that’s exactly what Rusty had figured would happen. “But…” There it was again, the painfully obvious fear of getting an alien parasite up his nose. “I made fire.”

“It was my idea,” Douglass said. “You just ramped it up to a billion and added a ‘hey buddy, hold my beer’ personal touch.” He flung a disgusted hand at the bag. “Four maggots boil rocks, Rusty. What fuck you think you’re gonna do with hundreds?”

Rusty blinked. “…boil more rocks?”

“Fuck off.”

Rusty quickly glanced at Envy, who inwardly groaned. “Hey Doug, maybe you could just stay up for the night, let Rusty sleep until light? He can carry you tomorrow while you sleep.” The one thing their ‘fire’ didn’t provide was light, and neither she nor Rusty would be any good to them on watch without light.

Rusty nodded vigorously.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Douglass demanded. “I’m not gonna sleep for shit on that asshole’s shoulder.”

They really didn’t have a better alternative, aside from getting up and trudging down to that tiny willow grove and trying to find enough dry firewood to cast some light on their camp enough for Envy and Rusty to see.

“I know it sucks,” Envy said, “but right now we don’t have much choice.”

Douglass gave Envy a very long, very pointed look that was just a couple of inches off center. “I want moonside.”

Even as Envy grimaced, Rusty quickly swung to look at her hopefully.

“Fine,” Envy muttered. “Fine.” Then, quickly, she said, “But just for a night.”

“All nights. I don’t need a baseball bat trying to impregnate my ribcage as I’m sitting there keeping you guys safe.”

Rusty was nodding vigorously, now, though he was obviously more concerned about alien nose parasites than ribcage impregnation.

“So how about Rusty takes the outside, I get moonside, and you get behind me?” Envy demanded.

Too quickly, Douglass said, “Done,” and she realized with a flushing face that was what their friendly neighborhood doctor had planned from the beginning. And, in that moment, she also realized that she was not only dealing with someone who was potentially smarter than her—which didn’t happen very often and made her immediately uncomfortable—but who was willing to plan out what he wanted and lay traps for hapless former billionaires to fall into with the ease of one of her father’s professional sharks.

But Rusty, oblivious, was nodding even more emphatically. “Yeah,” he said, “sounds good to me. Right, Captain?”

Envy scowled at Douglass, who was giving her a little smirk that said he knew that she knew—and it amused him. Fucker. She resisted the urge to stuff one of the maggots in his shoes for good measure.

Taking a deep breath, Envy cleared her throat and said, “Sure. Sounds good. I get the middle.” And she really shouldn’t complain—the middle was warmer, anyway.

Then again, even though the world had gone to shit, even though she was currently salivating over the raw, bloody carcass of a rabbit, there was something about the thought of being constrained between two strange male bodies that made her innately uneasy.

At least Douglass wasn’t boorish about it. As Envy and Rusty traded places on the blanket, Douglass just dried out his socks by their ‘fire’ and made a couple casual comments about how much he missed Modern America and its many amenities.

And, after dinner was ‘served’—or, more accurately, torn apart by the brutish hands of a hungry six-foot-eight ape—and they settled in for bed, Douglass kept a gentlemanly gap between the two of them, touching her only where it was absolutely necessary, and moving only to add maggots to their ‘fire’ when the bowl started to cool.

Maybe he’s not such a bad guy, Envy thought, relaxing a little. Within a few minutes, she fell asleep.

She woke to screaming.