Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RILEY WASN'T SURE what they should say that evening during dinner. She didn't think the guards would take well to the idea that they were laying eggs. But—at the same time—she didn't know if trying to hide it would be wise.

For all she knew, the guards were all jerking off before bed, and she couldn't imagine how they'd react to the idea that their genitals were altered if they saw it with no warning.

Furthermore, however, explaining how she and Jonathan had discovered this about themselves was… no, she couldn't. And anyway, they couldn't be sure it was affecting everyone the same way.

So, they stuck to the following:

The male cells were dividing and mutating at an unnatural rate. Jonathan had an injection that could slow it and it seemed to be working on him with no ill effects. Any of the other men who wanted it could have it.

The female cells were not dividing, but they did seem to have been altered. However, the change seemed complete. Something may have happened to the female reproductive system. Whether this was the result of Bub's needlelike fingers or a combination of whatever Bub had done and the exposure to the soup from the lab in the water supply, no one could say.

The idea of reproductive systems being messed with had everyone nervous.

But none of the male guards wanted the injection that Jonathan had made except Luther. And Riley couldn't fault them for that. After all, it was experimental, and they couldn't know what it would do to them.

After the evening meal, she went back to her room and took several shots of liquor, because there was a well-stocked amount of liquor in each of the cabins, something gratis from Anderson Scott, she supposed.

And then, she lay in bed, hoping she'd fall asleep, because she didn't want to think about what was happening to her.

She felt helpless.

She felt invaded.

She felt assaulted.

But there was no one to blame for any of these things. They were just happening.

And then, maybe because she was drunk, she lay awake thinking of that strange, long stinger that had appeared, growing like an arrow behind Jonathan's penis.

And she thought about Jonathan's penis, and she thought it was a nice penis. It had been a while since she'd seen a man's penis, truthfully, but from what she remembered, his seemed good in the girth and length department, and—for whatever reason—even though she'd been out of her mind with fear about her body changing and totally embarrassed to be half-naked in front of him, the sight of it had sort of turned her on.

Maybe, if she was honest with herself, the strange stinger-ovipositor had turned her on too.

But she didn't want to be honest with herself about that.

She didn't want to, because that was awful.

She didn't want to remember the sensation of Jonathan's finger sliding into her, which shouldn't have felt good, because she knew that women didn't have a lot of nerve endings in their vaginal canal, but this had felt… fuck . And then her cervix was somehow crazy sensitive.

She had felt it ripple. She had felt it move. She had felt it suck in his finger, and it been good, very good, so good.

Now, in bed, she rolled over and curled up, hugging her knees to her chest and tried to summon tears that wouldn't come.

She was terrified and she wanted to cry, but she felt as if everything that was happening was too intense to properly even understand or think about. Her emotions were reeling from the hits that had been coming one after another. If she fell to pieces now, she'd never be able to put herself back together.

Or…

Were her emotions altered too?

Did amphibians feel in the same way that humans did?

Had she been changed in that way too, now more resilient but colder, more animal?

She shuddered, not wanting to even think that.

Inside her, her body rippled, her cervix twitching, and the pleasure rocked through her.

She had a sudden urge to find Jonathan right now, to get him to attempt to put that stinger inside her, all the way inside her, and to fill her up.

" No, " she said aloud, rolling onto her back.