the spike
They're out to get you, there's demons closing in on every side
They will possess you unless you change that number on your dial
Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together, yeah
All through the night I'll save you from the terror on the screen
I'll make you see
-Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (feat. Vincent Price)
Oscar had gotten the distinct sense that he was a fifth wheel, on the camping trip. Maybe it was the look Elizabeth's boyfriend gave him when he approached their SUV. Maybe the little argument between Lizzie and Dirk. Maybe it was the way they had told him he had to ride in the back trunk, or the fact that they had only packed enough tents for four people, so it looks like you're gonna hafta sleep in the car, Ozzie.
Y'know. The little things.
He was now collecting firewood. So far, this had consisted of walking as far as he could from the campsite, so he wouldn't see Dirk and Bolt's smirking faces, wouldn't remember the way Mr. Hardpeck and Mr. Vanderhuge, respectively, had stuffed him into lockers, often with some sweaty gym sock for a gag.
After checking in with the park rangers and arriving at the campsite, Oscar had known better than to hold his phone up and mutter "no bars." It had taken him all of thirty seconds to check his coverage area onli--
"No bars," he had heard Dirk mutter behind him.
"Oscar? What's wrong?" Elizabeth had said a few seconds later. "Why are you palming your face like that?"
Shortly thereafter, Oscar had gone out to look for firewood. It was the only way he was going to keep from going all Fist of the North Star on the jocks. Or maybe Giga Drill Breaker. Or Falcon Punch. He didn't remember the name of the girl Bolt had been with. He had, however, noticed the little plastic baggie Vanderhuge had sticking out of his pocket. So he was planning to go out into the woods and get baked and laid. All he'd need would be Walt Whitman poetry and he'd be in a jeans commercial.
It occurred to him it was too warm to need a fire. He frowned, and kept walking. He would find firewood and shove it down their throats if he had to. Probably have a lot of fiber--
The impression he got from their initial collision was of softness, of a warmth under a thin layer of cotton. Green cotton; scrubs. Both Oscar and the girl wearing said scrubs had fallen to the ground, and the first thing he noticed was that she had the type of looks normally achieved by plastic surgery, but she seemed refreshingly free of that "mannequin" look. A certain movement when she propped herself up on her elbows--what Oscar thought of as "Gainaxing"--indicated that she was all natural.
"I want your cock," she said.
"I'm still using it," he said automatically.
"No, I want to eat your dick."
Oscar decided to stand up before replying. While doing so, he looked at the girl carefully. She was wearing scrubs, as he had already noticed, with a few rips in them, and she was barefoot. Her hair was cut short, but aside from her clothing she could've walked down any catwalk in Paris or Milan without comment.
He was instantly suspicious.
She grinned at him from the forest floor. "So how about it, big boy?"
Oscar remained stone-faced. "One question; how did you know where to hide the cameras?"
"What?"
"I could've run into you pretty much anywhere. I didn't even plan on being here; Elizabeth had to talk me into getting out of the house. A campsite makes for a more controlled environment, and I'm pretty sure you need permission to film on public land."
"What are you--"
"What I find amazing is the idea that employees of a television network could plan such a clockwork operation is still more likely than me going out into the woods and randomly running into a woman who wants to have sex with me."
"Either you actually do, or I'm on Candid Camera. Which would be amazing, 'cause they haven't had a Candid Camera in '04." Of course, there was always the possibility the girl in front of him was, like, a crazy person. As much fun as he'd heard losing one's virginity was, he decided to walk away. The girl tackled him two seconds later.
By the time his head cleared, the girl already had his pants open. He reached for the back of his head, and found only the bark from the root his head had bounced off of when he went down. This left one other major problem; the crazy girl who seemed bent on mongling his dongle.
"Hey!"
She wasn't listening.
"Hey, stop!"
She pulled the waistband of his thin BVDs down, slipping it past his half-erect penis.
Okay, he could either call for help, have Bolt and Dirk come to save him, and his sexuality bought into question for the rest of his high school career, or he could be raped. He had been raised with a strong belief in Never Hitting Girls, and he found that difficult to--
The girl pulled her top up, smushed her large breasts around his member, breathing on it hotly.
Oscar made a strangled noise.
The girl swirled her tongue under his glans. And then she bit into his penis.
If you had asked Oscar, ahead of time, what having his dick snacked on would feel like, he would have winced and asked if there was a safe word. He would not have thought it felt like dozens of tiny needles in his flesh. This was explained when the girl raised her head and her teeth had turned into dozens of tiny little needles.
Oscar, quite understandably, began to scream.
Back at the camp, Bolt raised his head from Elizabeth's neck. "Don't tell me the little 'tard walked onto a bear trap or something."
"Bolt, *stop*!" The girl pushed the fullback off. "He could be hurt!"
"No he's not. Look, he's stopped screaming."
The reason Oscar had stopped screaming, as it happened, was that the girl had reached up, her hand now looking like a thin covering of skin over bone, squeezed his mouth shut, and punched her fingers through his lips, clamping them. The she had detached her hand somehow, a new one growing from the stump, its bones twisted, spiked lengths of red and white.
"He could be dead!"
"Fine." Bolt started to dress. "Probably stubbed his toe."
+++++
Something had happened to the girl's breasts. She had pushed them together before she started biting, and they still hadn't fallen, the indentations on her flesh still visible, despite her arms having wrapped around his waist, pulling him closer.
New spikes of pain, and as he looked down he saw the problem. The girl's breasts had shifted somehow, moving inward toward his penis. The teeth and the new spikes gave a horrible sensation of displacement, of invasion--
She was putting something *in* him.
The girl slipped off his penis, mouth returning to it's normal shape. She wiped something red off her face with the back of her hand. Oscar grabbed his dick, looking for whatever freaky parasite or Noun Flu she h--
His penis crunched in his hand.
It wasn't the whole thing, of course, just a hard core, right along the lower side. Oscar wasn't sure where his urethra was, but he figured whatever reverse-tapeworm or whatever shouldn't be *crunching* like stale Pocky, with a ridged core and crackly outer edges.
Come to think of it, maybe a bony piece of fried chicken might be a better analogy. Except for the part where the chicken exploded into spikes, lacerating his palm and making his skin and flesh shrink, as if they were being drawn into the hypothetical bone, before the bone instantly swelled back to its original size, color and texture. It looked exactly like his penis had before the mysterious girl had chowed down on it.
Oscar, cradling his hand, looked at her. "What did you do to me?" he tried to say. His mouth was still clamped shut, but she seemed to get the message.
The girl smiled.
His dick was back to normal. No, it only looked normal, like someone had cleanly removed his original equipment and attached an advanced but still prosthetic replacement. The pain was gone, but it suddenly flared up again in his testicles. The left went through the process a little faster than the right, then the spikes reached his pelvis.
His dick had been bad, but bone being replaced by spikes hurt even more. He could feel his hips detach from their sockets, then snapping right back into place. He remembered something about women having different pelvises than men, and pushed at his hips, trying to force them back into place, even as his thighs widened, straining the seams of his jeans.
At some point, he had started crying.
Something stabbed downward from his perineum, out through his skin, then pulled back, leaving Oscar with an odd feeling in his lower abdomen. He reached behind his balls, and found a wet slit. Vaginas were all well and good, but they weren't supposed to be on men, not on *him*--
Something stabbed into his eye, and he clutched at it before the pain receded. Looking at the girl, he realized that one of her eyes had turned brown, just like his, and one of his eyes wasn't nearsighted anymore. He had just enough time to raise his glasses before the stab of pain in the other eye, and the vision in that one cleared too.
"You see?" said the girl, her eyes wide and staring. "It's better this way. You are perfect. *We* are perfect. The spike is perfect. We can share everything. Our bodies, our flesh."
Oscar punched her and ran.
The girl picked herself up, bonelessly, like a puppet on springs. The blood around her mouth absorbed itself into her skin. "You shouldn't have done that."
The boy fell down. His feet had locked up, somehow, and his arms flailed and pushed him over onto his back. The girl calmly walked up to him.
"I was *trying* to be nice!" She said, walking around him. "But now I'll show you." A high, keening laugh. "I'll show all of them why they *shouldn't have put me in that hole!*"
Ranting. Not good.
Her shoulders bulked up, and she made a squeezing gesture. Oscar felt his own shoulders shrink, as if the flesh had drained away. If this girl had control of the spike, whatever it was, it meant she controlled his body. Or maybe the spike controlled her.
The hand on his mouth was...absorbed into his skin somehow. The girl knelt down, and pressed her lips to his, and when she pulled back, his lips had swollen to Jolie proportions, the lines on his face softening.
"Why are you turning me into a woman?" he screamed. He *tried* to scream. Somehow, his vocal cords weren't working properly. He could barely talk above a whisper. The girl cinched his waist into something normally achieved with corsets before answering.
"I'm not, not entirely." She giggled. "Look, you still have your precious dick. I'll even make it bigger, see?"
"Change me back!"
"Hang on, hang on," she said, shoving the leftover mass into his chest. Two large spikes shot out of his nipples, and his back arched in pain. The breasts filled in a second later, like air filling a balloon, and he lay back, gasping.
The girl frowned, pursing her lips in a mockery of concentration. She plumped out Oscar's legs, tweaked his arms and feet. His face was fine. And for the cherry on the cupcake, she lengthened his eyelashes.
"There," She said happily. "Done."
Oscar sat up, warily. Aside from going all futa and having memories from the girl--something about death row and a bioweapons experimentation facility and a crashed transport--he seemed fine. He planted one hand on a tree and levered himself up.
"On the bright side," he said to himself, "Dirk and Bolt probably won't be stuffing me into lockers anymore."
THE END
NOT REALLY
Oscar looked up. There was a female deer nearby, one foot raised, as if surprised mid-step. It stared at him and the girl, and a smile spread across the latter's face.
He looked at the deer. He looked at the girl. He looked down. He did some rapid arithmetic, mostly with regard to averages.
"*Frak* no," he said.
He tried to lunge for the girl, but she was already moving, and his body seemed to lock up, sending him crashing to the ground. He still had a good view as the girl latched onto the startled deer's flank, bearing it down like a lion on a zebra. Whatever psychic link of hive-mind they shared allowed him to feel the exact moment the spike hit the spike hit the terrified doe's bloodstream. It was close to the rear legs, so it immobilized her rear legs so she couldn't escape. She tried anyway, forelegs scrabbling desperately at the dirt, throwing up clods of earth.
Oscar tried to get up, managing to get his upper body up.
This one was faster, more brutal. It started with his the skin of his face growing. His skull was a little behind, so the excess skin hung over his face, blinding him. When his skull had grown to fit, he had human features stretched over a half-deer, half-human skull. The spike began to rectify his features, turning his terrified brown right eye into a black one. His green left eye remained unchanged, and he used it to look at the deer. It had somehow gained one brown eye, and it's face was flattening, becoming more human. Its thin, toothpick legs bulked up in instants, and he felt a twinge in the general area of his coccyx; a tail. Fur grew on his face, and his nose shifted down, moving in a wave of little spikes to the front of his muzzle.
The fur spread out from his head and tail, sweeping over the thick pad of his butt. The deer's forelimbs were being spiked, then growing larger. Its right hoof disappeared under a wave of rippling red, then reappeared in the form of a human-like hand, albeit one with only three fingers. Oscar's own left hand stiffened, and he watched in horror as the spike cover his hand in a red crust. The stuff flaked off as he rubbed it, leaving a hoof. His feet had done the same, leaving them with the deer's two larger, extended central toes, and the smaller dewclaws.
The doe was in similar distress, its not quite human limbs and head attached to its cervine torso.That was quickly rectified; Oscar could see its spine lengthening, protrusions rippling under its skin like a creature from a monster movie. It probably felt the same way he did right now, clutching his stomach as his internal organs shifted. How many stomachs did deer have? Was his stomach getting more deerlike, or was the deer's getting more humanlike? And what of the girl?
She was sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, ignoring the alterations to her anatomy, the horns growing on her head. There was a half-smile on her face, growing larger as she played with something in her lap--
No.
Not on her lap.
The dick growing from her crotch still seemed raw and unfinished. She was probably drawing the pleasure out, making its growth last as long as possible. Oscar looked at the doe, and found her doing something similar with herself, and his stomach turned and his meagre breakfast suddenly surged up his throat to dampen the litter decorating the forest.
And the smells...the girl and the doe smelt like they were in heat, and of a growing, musky scene the doe's mind said was buck.
The doe's hand moved to a budding breast and massaged it, squeezing it roughly. She was almost human now, and seemed entirely unconcerned about her new body. He was pretty much finished himself, and it seemed like a good idea to just...give in. The girl or the spike or whatever was in charge would never change him back, so he might as well enjoy his new--his Internet-informed vocabulary groped for the right word--fursuit.
He looked at the girl's dick again. And he wondered how it would taste.
And that was wrong, that was horribly wrong, because he was supposed to hate it, be terrified of it because absolute fear was a root-level command, so it should be overriding everything else and if he was feeling something other than fear it meant the spike was in his brain. There were no nerve endings in the brain, he recalled, so he wouldn't even feel his mind being--
Oscar opened his eyes.
There wasn't much left, by this point; a few tweaks to his feet, the bones of his hand, and a brief shiver, something Oscar, and thus the trio's shared mind, found analogous to a computer's reset after installing software.
Oscar stood up, taking his first, deep, few breaths as a hybrid. There was no doubt now, just an imperative. To share the spike, by any means necessary.
He could smell them now, and he knew the the girl and the doe could too. Sweat and lust on all of them, and the alkaline reek of cannabis on the latter two. Two male, one female.
They all went to say hi.
+++++
"Elizabeth?"
A hand reached for her cheek, paused, and then put two fingers on her shoulder, pressing gently.
Elizabeth woke with a start. She had laid down with her head facing the opening of the tent. Twilight had passed, but the moon hadn't risen yet, sitting behind the trees like a surly child.
"Oscar? She rubbed at her sleep-bleared eyes. She could just make out the dim form in front of her, and yawned.
"Remember the time," she said, smiling at him, "you told me that people cover their mouths when they yawn because we used to think that your soul could get out that way?"
"I remember."
"Everyone else went out to look for you."
"I know. We met in the forest. Had a nice talk."
The moon crested the trees, and she could see the shapes behind him now, things with horns and noses and fur and little black eyes.
"All friends now. Want to show you."
Elizabeth, quite understandably, began to scream.
ENDF
"the spike"
by Eulalie "Nequ" Quentin
2009 Creative Commons By-SA-NC