Chapter 12: Children of the Damned
This oneâs for Shadowhawk, who is keeping me honest.
Andrewâs Story Telempathy
It happened one night. I had been going down on Dee Dee, giving her one of my patented âmake her talkâ jobs. Because of her fragile condition (she is seven months preggers after all) I relented after only about fifteen minutes of gentle torture and got her off big time. Her screams could have woken the dead. But it wasnât the dead she woke.
I lay there with my head on her enlarged belly. She is incredibly beautiful pregnant. Her face is aglow. Her tits are sensitive, her skin radiates health. I hear Donnie and Deirdre complain about how fat and ugly they are, but they just donât get it.
They are ravishingly beautiful. Any man looking at them must be torn between wanting to protect them from harm and wanting to fuck them senseless. Thatâs the way I feel every day of my life. I spend fifty percent of my life protecting them from harm. I spend fifty percent of my life fucking them senseless. It seems like a fair trade-off to me.
I was hugging her gently, my head on her protuberant belly when I felt them. They werenât kicking. Dee Dee felt nothing physical, Iâm sure. I felt them inside of me. In my head, I guess. It was a presence. It was two presences. I just
knew
there were two
things
that were touching me, aware of me. I felt like the theme song of the
Twilight Zone
should be playing in the background.
Dee Dee didnât even notice. She was trying to recover from her most recent orgasm, knowing that there were more on the agenda. But those orgasms might have to wait.
My life hasnât been exactly normal since I met Deirdre, but this took the cake. I suddenly knew that she was having twins. Of course we expected her to have twins. There is precedence after all; only like four generations. But we didnât bother with ultrasound or any other means of determining sex or number or children. We opted for going as natural as possible.
But here were these two motes, these tiny intelligences, and they were touching my being. Had Dee Dee woken them up with her screams? Well thatâs a hell of a way to come to life: Mom screams in orgasm, child wakes up.
Is it me? My first reactions were a mixture of awe, wonderment, disbelief and cynicism. My cynicism derived from the possibility, nay likelihood, that I was losing my mind. When oneâs head is invaded by two other presences, believe me the surest explanation is that youâve gone nuts. All other possible explanations pall on the probability scale next to âyouâve lost your mindâ. That one approaches one hundred per cent, and all the other possible explanations fall into the realm of ânot bloody likelyâ.
I realize that a madman who diagnosis himself has a lunatic for a doctor. But my gut feeling was that I hadnât gone crazy. Looking at my head in an objective way, what had I thought, said, or done that would indicate that I was losing my mind?
Letâs consider. I had fallen in love with a woman ten years my senior. I had then fallen in love with her identical twin sister while still loving the original one. I quit my job from a place where I was the fair-haired boy to go into business for myself. I talked my wives (yes, for all intents and purposes, I have two wives) into accepting responsibility for a 175 year old plantation that doesnât grow anything but termites. I took over some obscure organization that was being run by an eighty-five year old woman, invested every penny I have along with a fair amount of money from my wives to fix up a tumble-down wreck of a house, dropped everything and moved to fucking Georgia of all places. Why would anyone call me crazy?
I put the âIâve lost my mindâ scenario on the back burner, willing to listen to my instinct that maybe I wasnât crazy. If I wasnât, then the second most likely scenario is that I was feeling the presence of my children.
What was I feeling? I tried to analyze it. It wasnât thought. It was more like emotion: bewilderment, wonder, mild surprise, something like that.
It was telempathy. Is that a word? If it wasnât, it is now. They were projecting their emotions onto me. Itâs a possible theory anyway. My theory is: these things, these fetuses, these future people, have no consciousness or at least no conscious thought. All they can do is feel, am I right?
Perhaps they are conscious in the womb, almost certainly are, otherwise why the kicking deal? But what could they think? They have no language. They are in this warm wet place, hearing garbled noises through a wall of flesh, feeling the beat of their motherâs heart. They were inside of Deirdre. I speak from experience: they were in heaven. Letâs face it: it can only go downhill from there.
Does this telempathy only go one way? I can feel them. Can they feel me? I was already starting to be overwhelmed with emotion.
These motes that had invaded my head, they were my babies! I was flooded with love, tears were in my eyes. My arms tightened a bit around Dee Deeâs waist. I didnât want to hurt her. I didnât want to hurt them. I wanted to hold all three of them to my heart forever.
I felt their response! They knew what it was to be loved. They were content. And slowly I felt them leave me. They were going back to sleep happy.
Deirdre was looking at me. âAndrew whatâs the matter? Why are you crying, sweetie?â
I merely shook my head. I felt it best to sit on this one for a while. Who knows if it would ever happen again? And why should I worry Dee Dee about the state of my mental health when she is in her delicate condition?
I said, âIâm just happy. How couldnât I be happy? I have the most beautiful wife in the world, and sheâs ready to give birth to our children. Iâm just happy, baby.â
Dee Dee smiled warmly. âI love you, Andrew. I hope youâre right about children. If it is only one child, Iâll never be able to lose all of this weight. I feel like a tub of lard.â
I could only respond with the obvious. âYou look like an angel. There has never been a more beautiful prospective mother. You glow.â
She pulled me up to her. We lay side-by-side basking in each otherâs company. This was the woman I had loved at first sight. Well I had lusted after at first sight. Maybe love didnât come into the picture for a day or two. My emotions werenât exactly under control back then.
And now she was giving birth to our children. Our emotions had to be the same ones shared by men and women since the invention of pair bonding. Itâs a primal feeling that the race would continue, your line will continue. We are fulfilling the primary purpose of our existence.
I held her to me and we kissed. Again she tasted herself on my lips. It seemed fitting somehow, completing a cycle like that. We are forever, Dee Dee and I.
What is extremely weird about our situation is that in an hour or two I would be with Donnie experiencing the very same emotions all over again. Talk about your Déjà vu?
Would Donnieâs babies also be telempathatic? Hey, Iâve got to develop a whole new word structure here. Not to digress, but I could become famous as the man who introduced the term telempathy to the world. Yes, some people talk of telepathy as if it might exist. But Iâve got something real that does exist and no one has thought of it yet. Well if they thought of it, nobody told me. I better pass it through my spell-checker before I make any claims.
Anyway, what of Donnieâs babies? Are there two? Are they telempathatic? Why would they be? Why wouldnât they be? Is this part of the ânext generationâ or have the dice just come up sevens for Dee Dee and I?
If it is a genetic thing related to the way Dee Dee and I mixed our DNA at the time of conception, then what is the likelihood of Donnieâs and my DNA mixing the same way? Not very, I would imagine.
But maybe this is a trait that breeds true. Had you thought of that? (Damn Iâm sounding more and more like those two women every day, if you know what I mean.) What if whatever combination of genes that has apparently developed within Deirdre is the natural result of the combination of our gene sets, rather than some fluke of nature, some aberration, some mutation?
That would answer a lot of questions. Well, it would create a lot more questions than it answers, but it would answer some questions that have been in my mind for quite some time. The biggy is: how can I tell them apart?
Yes, that is a question that has bugged me for a while. I donât do anything special. I havenât noticed any blemish on one twin that isnât on the other. They are both blemish-free in my eyes.
No one in their lives has ever been able to tell them apart before, not even their parents. How bad is that? But I can. I can tell them apart. Without even thinking about it I can tell them apart. Do we have a seed of empathy between us, so deeply ingrained that we donât even know that it exists? Is that it?
And is that seed set to grow even more empathy in our offspring, empathy to the point of telempathy? This is an interesting development, assuming it is a development. IAM might be breeding for intelligence and might end up with telempathy on top of it. How do you like them apples?
Of course, this is just a theory Iâm working on. Hey, Iâve only had one experience with Dee Deeâs babies. I still havenât established my own sanity yet. That will be the first test. Then letâs see if I can feel Donnieâs babies. Well, that still wonât establish my sanity, will it? Rather the opposite, I should think.
Thereâs only one thing for me to do now. Give Dee Dee those promised orgasms. The rest will have to wait.
Donnieâs Story
It was late Sunday morning when my water broke. I was in the bathroom performing my morning rituals when it happened. Strangely, I wasnât nervous or scared. I calmly went downstairs to inform Andrew and Deirdre.
Andrew was in the den watching the pre-game hype. I knew that he had his Heineken in the refrigerator and was thinking about making his noon-time run to McDonaldâs for his Big Mac. He has habits that he lives by. Today they would have to wait.
âAndrew, my water broke. We need to go to the hospital.â
He looked at me with a confused expression on his face. âYouâre water broke? Are you sure?â
I said, âAndrew itâs hard to miss something like that.â
He was in denial. âBut itâs Sunday. The Browns are playing the Ravens! Itâs a grudge match! These kids wonât be born till tomorrow, right?â
I said to him, âGo call our doctor. Tell him what happened, and then ask him what we should do.â Let the doctor take the responsibility of blowing off the Ravens and the Browns. You would think that since we are in Georgia he would want to root for the Falcons.
I was headed to the kitchen to tell Deirdre when I bumped into her coming the other way. We both said, âGuess what! My water broke!â
We hugged each other and laughed. Tears were streaming down our faces. I told Dee Dee, âYou tell Andrew, will you? Heâs going to have a heart attack, and heâs going to miss his football game.â