The XXX Files Season Two (Episodes 5-8) (6 page)

Spat, splat, splatter — warm cum rained on her hot skin. Courtney turned her head, smiling at Brad and spreading her ass cheeks again so he could see how his cum oozed from her cunt.
 

She fell to the floor, and Brad fell beside her.
 

Their hands met, and they started rubbing their fingers together; slowly, softly and truly in love.
 

Lying beside her, Brad felt the black cancer of his lies. He squeezed her hand tighter, willing it to go away, wishing he had spoken only truth, and wondering if the Red Breath had broken a part of him that would never be whole again.
 

With Courtney, honesty should be easy. Brad truly loved her. He felt safe and comfortable, finally home. Yet, by lying to her Brad felt like he was holding a match to that home’s dried out garden.
 

He
had
to tell her the truth because he couldn’t risk being without her. In Courtney’s absence, his dreams would die and never return.
 

He had to resist temptation, stay away from it entirely. That meant not letting Red Breath get the best of him, to do that he would have to do what he had done since the day he got caught with the waitress — constantly remind himself how much better Courtney was than any potential alternative.
 

Brad had a list, 47 items long, and on that list were all the main reasons he loved Courtney. Whenever temptation hung like a scent in the air, Brad would recite these reasons to himself, starting at #47 and counting back to #1:
Because she trusted him, even though he couldn’t be trusted.
 

Brad counted reasons as he drifted to sleep, losing consciousness somewhere around #21 while Courtney snored beside him.
 

He woke up screaming, no longer on his living room floor.
 

Brad was on a table. Above him hovered the aliens — the ones who often haunted his nightmares — staring down at him as they pulled the answers they needed from the silence inside him.
 

He screamed again, thrashing against the cold metal at his back, trying to free himself.
 

The aliens laughed, pressing their collective thumb into his inescapable torment.
 

Brad screamed, then opened his eyes to the real world. He was still no longer on the floor of the living room, but as he blinked and looked around he saw that he was in their bed, safe and sound like he always was with his best friend, partner, and lover.
 

Brad shuddered, realizing for the first time that the dreams following him into his new life with Courtney were new. He shuddered.
 

Something seemed
off
, though
Brad had no idea what that something was. He looked around the bedroom again, then over to Courtney snoring. She wore a thin smile, higher on one side then the other, seemingly lost in the most pleasant of dreams as her beautiful breasts rose and fell, naked beneath the sheet.
 

Brad rested his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes, and again started counting down from #47.
 

His eyes shot back open. Brad could suddenly feel what he couldn’t before. Something on his arm; a bump.
 

He peeled the covers from his body, then bit his lip to keep from screaming as he ran his fingers over the bump that hadn’t been there before and whatever was beneath his skin moved, burying itself deeper until the bump was no longer showing.

That wasn’t a dream.
   

TO BE CONTINUED ...

EPISODE 6

CHAPTER 1 — Brad Hammer

Brad Hammer sat in Thaddeus Edmund’s tiny, cramped, crappy ass apartment, staring at his tottering piles of trash, garbage, and assorted “treasures” while waiting for the him to return with a prognosis.
 

Thaddeus was a dirty, filthy hoarder, and Brad only slightly preferred hanging out in his apartment to sloshing through Venetian sewers in pursuit of Italian fuckwuzzles, but he had no choice. There was no one better than Thaddeus when it came to giving Brad answers no one else had and probably couldn’t get, especially when he was running against the clock — which is what he was certainly had to do if there was something beneath his fucking skin. But what really made the horrors of his dingy apartment worth dealing with was that Thaddeus could be trusted to say nothing. Brad didn’t want Courtney to know what he found in his arm because her worry would be out of control, which was why he slipped out in predawn. Out of everyone they knew either in or involved with Division, Thaddeus was the one guy Brad knew would keep his secret safe from Courtney.
 

Brad squinted, trying to figure out what sort of crap was piled a half dozen feet from his knee, without moving from his spot. The pile was waist high, with lots of plastic and dangling cords. Nothing in the miniature mountain looked like any sort of electronics Brad had ever seen. Though he had never been in his car, Brad imagined anything Thaddeus drove probably looked a lot like his house — likely piled with old notes and phone books, maybe cans of dog food, even though he didn’t have a dog. Brad pictured opening the passenger door and having to pivot clear as a wave of refuse rolled out from inside.
 

In reality, his hoarding wasn’t
too
bad. It was clutter rather than filth. Thaddeus kept clothes he didn’t wear, but then again, who didn’t? Brad wasn’t exactly a neat freak, but he did like things tidy, and regularly expunged the stuff in his closet he didn’t wear. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a few old threads from concerts, or shit he kept for nostalgia. He still had the olive green sweater he wore on his first date with Suzy Norman back when he was 19. By contrast, it looked like Thaddeus kept everything he ever bought, and since his closets didn’t have room to hold it all, his ephemera spilled into every room.
 

Each of the rooms seemed to have at least one non-working TV — the bathroom had two — with stacks of old VHS tapes piled beside them. Though the living room was the largest room by far, it was also the most claustrophobic, with the largest number of piles, and a jumbo fridge that was too wide to fit through the narrow door leading back to the apartment’s tiny kitchen. The fridge was surrounded by a thrift shop’s worth of assorted electronics and appliances — all probably broken, especially the pre-Internet printers, which had tall stacks of perforated paper beside them.

Even with an apartment harboring an apocalypse of clutter, dealing with Thaddeus was better than telling Courtney and hearing her worry out loud.
 

The toilet flushed, the sink ran for exactly one second, then Thaddeus came back through the kitchen and into the living room, his hair in a hundred different places and big eyes bugged out like always behind thick glasses. An over-swollen gut stretched his sky blue Van Halen “1984” T-shirt to fraying threads, spilling just enough from the bottom for Brad to see his blotchy, red skin.
 

It was hard to believe that Thaddeus was once one of Division 69’s best and brightest scientific minds, at least he was back before he went batshit crazy from one too many DMT trips.

DMT was a psychedelic, and depending on the dose and means of ingestion, its effects ranged from a short-lived and rather mild psychedelic state, to a powerful and perhaps even out-of-body — fully immersive — experience. Thaddeus swore on every branch in his family tree that DMT allowed him to break connection with the conventional and tap into the alien realm. Maybe it did, but old Thaddeus had done the DMT
at least
one too many times, and now seemed to live in the “alien realm” more than anywhere else.
 

“So,” Brad asked, crossing his legs at the ankle and trying to make his body smaller. “Any thoughts?”
 

Thaddeus picked up the glass jar holding the small silver square that had been in Brad’s arm until Thaddeus dug it out 30 minutes before with instruments Brad hoped to fuck were more sterile than the rest of his trash heap. He brought it closer to his eyes, squinting from behind his lenses, even though Thaddeus had already looked at it under a high-powered microscope while making many mumbles and grumbles, refusing to “speculate out loud” until he had time to think on it.

“If I had to guess,” Thaddeus pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, “I’d say it’s a transmitter, but not like anything I’ve ever seen.” He pushed the jar away from him and toward the table’s center, as if proximity equaled danger. “This is some future ass shit on a level we’re not even close to yet.”

“What is it transmitting?” Brad asked.

“Fuck if I know. I suppose you’ll find out when whoever put it in you comes to see why it’s no longer there!”

“Great,” Brad muttered.

Thaddeus looked at Brad closer, squinting his eyes almost suspiciously. “You think it’s the aliens, don’t you? The ones who took your girlfriend?”

“The thought’s crossed my mind. I’ve been having these weird dreams — horrible — where I wake up on an operating table and there’s these shapes hovering above me. Then I wake up in bed, totally freaked. The dreams stopped for a while, and I figured I was finally free. Then last night I had one again, and for the first time I thought maybe they weren’t really dreams.”
 

Brad reached across the table, picked up the jar, then held it in front of his eyes, examining the small, silver disk inside. It seemed so much bigger when it was a bulge beneath his skin.
 

Brad set down the jar and turned to Beaker. “Why is it so small?”

“What do you mean?”
 

“The transmitter, or whatever it is, it’s so small. And yet it made this big-ass bump in my arm. Any idea why?”
 

“Hard to say,” Thaddeus
 
shrugged. “It might just be the swelling, then again, it might be something else. How do you feel about leaving it with me? More time means more answers, and I can reach out to a friend of mine, get his four eyes on it, too.”
 

“Do I know this friend?”

“Um, well sort of.” Thaddeus hemmed, hawed, then finally said, “Derek Spatz.”

Brad shook his head. “Spatz? Isn’t he the one who got busted for fucking the Bigfoot we had in captivity?”

Thaddeus first blushed, then made excuses for the Sasquatch fucker. “Well, yeah, but Spatz was lonely. It had been a helluva long while for him, and who among us doesn’t get lonely every now and then? Besides,” he waved his hand as if swatting the thought, “it wasn’t like it was a
male
Sasquatch. What are we talking, two steps down on the evolutionary ladder? Maybe three?”

“Oh, excuse me, well I guess that makes it OK,” Brad joked, ashamed that he could at least sort of relate. “So, what’s Spatz been doing these days, if not fucking semi-humans?”

“He’s writing erotica e-books, under a pen name as some chick. Tons of weird shit, like Bigfoot fucking, and way worse than that!” he laughed. “He has one series where this girl is prisoner of these werewolves, and they’re trying to breed her. People love that shit. He’s making an ass ton of money — definitely more than we are.”

“Damn, who knew there were so many Bigfoot fetishists out there? I’m in the wrong line of work. Wait ... ” Brad paused, trying to pull a memory from the bottom of his brain to the top. “Was the werewolf pack based on the lycan tribe out in the Gobe?”
 

“Well, of course,” Thaddeus shrugged. “How else would Spatz know about mating habits, or be able to describe their lairs in detail? Of course, names and places are changed and all that jazz or jizz or whatever. And it’s not like anyone would believe it anyway.”
 

“Are all his books based on Division cases?”
 

“Pretty much,” Thaddeus nodded, “Yeah.”
 

“You seem to know an awful lot about his work.”

“Professional courtesy,” he blushed, then changed the subject. “So, can I show it to Spatz or not?”

“Sure, that’s fine. How long will you need it?”

“I dunno,” Thaddeus scooped the jar from the table and wrinkled his nose. “Give me a couple of days, and I’ll get back to you with whatever I find.”

“OK,” Brad said, standing to leave and nearly tripping over a pile of “Popular Mechanics” as he stepped away from his pile of crates. He was eager to flee the dark apartment. “But listen — you don’t tell anyone where you got this. Understand?”

“Yeah, sure thing, Hammer,” Thaddeus said from behind a nervous grin.

Brad stepped toward him, broadcasting his most serious
fuck-me-over-and
-
pay
glare. Brad’s reputation was practically legend throughout Division 69, and among both active and non-active agents and associates. It only took one look from Brad for Thaddeus to know he wasn’t messing around.

The answer man fell a step back and, like Brad, nearly tumbled over a stack of magazines, except his mountain was made from “Victoria’s Secret” catalogues. Thaddeus must have known the layout of his garbage trail by heart since he managed to swerve, while making it look easy, even though the pile was behind him. He landed flat on his feet and said, “OK, Brad, I swear — I won’t say shit to anyone, including Courtney. Promise.”

His face was exactly as serious as it needed to be. “Thank you,” Brad said, then stepped through the living room as if walking through a minefield, then made it outside into the bright morning light and crossed the lawn to his Lincoln.