Chapter 20

I didn’t know how to feel about this.

The day after the revelations from Mother and Freya had dawned bright and warm. A fresh breeze blew in from the east, which kept the temperature from reaching that oppressive heat that often ruined beautiful days like this. A few wisps of cotton-white clouds wandered lazily across the sky, and there was an air of peacefulness around the island.

Of course, the fact that everybody in our group woke up completely lucid, most of them looking to me for answers, threw a bit of a spanner in the works. The decision was made - although I had no idea by whom - that we should head to the lake and talk there. I wasn’t complaining. That was still one of my favorite spots on the island so far.

A little while later, I was beginning to question my new reality. Hayley’s fingers were working through the knots in my shoulders while Liz and Robyn knelt between my knees, sharing my cock between them. Hannah was sitting between Amy’s legs, the older woman softly stroking the younger’s nipples while Katie openly played with herself watching. Off on the other side of the lake, Ray was being fawned over lewdly by Caroline and Zoe, while Tom and Louisa had snuck off somewhere more private.

Even completely lucid, the girls who had attached themselves to me, even Katie, the most distant of them all, had still clung to me on our way here and after we had arrived. I sat on a rock close to the outlet of the lake. Hayley was standing behind me and running her fingers over my shoulders, working out the stress that I had been holding there since this whole thing began, every now and then leaning forward to plant a kiss at the back of my neck. Hannah and Robyn were on either side of me, both leaning affectionately against me and both wandering their fingers over me. Katie, Amy, and Liz were all close by.

I had expected them to be a little more distant than normal, their new “presence” in reality tempering their usual affection. But instead, they seemed to be even more so than usual. Hayley had insisted on holding my hand on the walk here, her and Hannah gushing happily about being pregnant with my babies, and Robyn especially had been flashing me some very hungry looks.

On the other side of the river leading to the sea sat Ray. Caroline was sitting next to him. It was amazing to me that even with her breasts completely covered, I could now tell her apart from Zoe. I had no idea how, but I could see the differences between them as clear as day. For her part, Zoe was sitting between Ray’s legs and leaning back against him. The discomfort, mistrust, and self-consciousness that blighted our first mass-lucidity moment were well and truly gone.

Despite the comfort and affection being shown around the lake, it was Tom and Lousia who seemed to be the closest. Not needing outward displays of affection, the ease with which they enjoyed each other’s company was glaringly obvious. They simply sat together in the shallows, Louisa’s hand in Tom’s and his thumb stroking absently over the back of it. There was the softest of happy smiles on her face, and Tom - showing his total comfort with her - had no trouble whatsoever meeting her eyes.

“So, are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?” Amy finally broke the silence.

All eyes turned to me.

“Fuck!”

“Alright, what do you want to know?” I asked with a sigh.

“Let’s start with ‘everything’ and go from there.” Zoe laughed as she nuzzled back into Ray. The rest of the group just nodded.

I groaned loudly and pinched the bridge of my nose. I was having a hard time understanding everything on my own, trying to explain it all to a group of people; their range of knowledge ranging from most of it to none, sounded like it could form its own ring of hell. A ripple of teasing laughter at my frustration rippled around the lake. Out of everyone, Ray and Tom knew the most, followed by Amy and - by necessity - Louisa. Over the past few weeks, I had “woken” almost all of them and explained as much of the situation as I could; that amount varied greatly depending on how much time we had to talk and how much I knew myself at the time. Constantly working in fear of Mother hadn’t helped matters, but I was confident that was a problem I wouldn’t have any more.

With a deep breath, I started from the very beginning. It was, as Julie Andrews pointed out, a very good place to start. It was hard to believe that we had been on the Island for less than two months, and this had all begun after only a few days, the day we had all passed out and woken up in this very spot. I couldn’t help but cast a glance over to the wooded area where I had dragged Robyn and Hayley immediately after it. Robyn caught the look and flashed me a naughty wink. There was a molten heat behind her eyes, more fierce than anything I had seen before.

For the most part, the group remained quiet as I explained everything that had happened. I told them everything. There were parts, especially the events described by Dr. Walker’s recording, that I knew would scare them. But they deserved the truth. I had, it would have seemed, fallen into something of a protective mindset with all of them, but they were not children. They needed to know what was happening to them and around them.

Faces of varying expressions stared back at me, listening raptly as I went through the past few weeks’ events. Through it all, Hayley didn’t stop her attention on my shoulders, although her fingers faltered a few times.

A tense silence fell upon the group after I finished.

“Let me get this straight,” Liz tilted her head after a few quiet minutes. She had been one of the women who had been woken the least out of my group and had been hearing a lot of this for the first time. “We are all here specifically to be bred by you because our children, or grandchildren, or whatever, will be great leaders in some war against the other gods.”

“Err, there is a little more to it than that. But yes, basically.”

Liz shivered visibly, “Fuck, that’s hot!”

“But what about us?” Zoe asked. “I mean, we’re not ... you know ... with you.”

“Turns out Ray’s progeny are important too, and Tom’s.”

Zoe looked up at Caroline and then over to Liz. “Yeah, that is hot. We were destined to make you a Daddy, baby.” She finished with a grin to Ray.

Ray groaned comically. “Little Rays. God help us all.”

“Or Goddesses,” grinned Caroline.

“I think they’ve done enough,” he snorted.

“Not yet, they haven’t,” Robyn purred as she winked up at me.

“They seem to be doing fine to me,” Hayley laughed with a twinkle in her eyes.

Liz pulled a faux pouty face and rested her hand on her belly. “I’m not so sure about that; I haven’t had a baby fucked into me yet.”

“That you know of,” Amy grinned at her. “For all you know, that oven could be cooking a bun right now. Those two lucky bitches,” she nodded at Hayley and Hannah with a grin, “probably got knocked up within a day or two of getting here. They are over a month along now.”

“But it was weeks until I got him to fuck me!” Liz complained loudly, still pretending to sulk.

“So it will be that much longer ‘til we find out. Assuming he has put one in you yet.”

“So what you are saying,” Robyn purred, “is that we should keep fucking his brains out just to be sure.”

Amy’s mischievous grin grew a little wider. “Oh yes, I think that any of you ladies wanting to become pregnant should be taking every opportunity to milk your man.”

“Good enough for me!” Robyn beamed and stood from her place next to me and hooked a leg over my waist to straddle me.

“Are you lot sure you are all lucid?” I asked around a gasp as Robyn’s weight settled onto the quickly growing tent in my pants.

“Oh, shush. Do you think men have a monopoly on being sexual creatures? Now, you are gonna fuck your cum into me, got it?”

“Then me!” Liz chirped up

“I want some too!” Hannah purred.

“You’ve already been knocked up, ya greedy bitch!” Katie teased.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t want some of that dick.” Hannah giggled back.

I cast a glance over to Ray, looking for a bit of male solidarity and maybe getting back to the subject I felt hadn’t been covered in anywhere near enough detail. But it would seem he was having problems of his own. Zoe and Caroline had straddled a leg each and were grinding themselves onto him while taking turns kissing him hungrily.

Tom and Lousia were nowhere to be seen.

This was the moment I began to wonder how I should feel about all of this.

In the time it had taken me to glance around the lake, Hayley’s fingers had started to work me a little more firmly, their owner clearly enjoying the show as Robyn yanked my shorts off, pulled the strings of her bikini bottoms loose, and impaled herself on me in a single downward motion. A long, deep, drawn-out groan spilled from her lips as a pair of hands - possibly Liz’s - pulled Robyn’s top up and over her head to spill out her pert little breasts.

I was barely paying attention. My entire world had condensed down to the feeling of indescribable heat and tightness around my manhood and the fingers working so deftly on my shoulders. A hand had reached under Robyn’s bouncing and gyrating ass to start rubbing over my balls. They had gone from entirely uninterested in sex - given the seriousness of the conversation - to full, heavy, and more than ready in a few short minutes. The hand caressing and tugging at them was speeding that process along nicely.

Robyn started to bounce. Deep, hard, and primal ruts where she slammed her hips down with increasing urgency. It had been a few days since I had last been with her, and apparently, she was feeling it.

Her eyes were glazed over, not in the way I had been used to seeing over the past few months, but this time in pure carnal lust. Her lips were parted, and the groans from her lips were becoming higher in pitch and harder in urgency. I could feel the fluttering and tremble from her pussy as she already approached the first of what would be several highs. I was well aware of these girls’ appetites, and Robyn was about as veracious as they came.

Hayley, who seemed to be relishing her position as my “girlfriend,” was not only more than happy to share my time but, judging by the steadily increasing pressure of her fingers, was enjoying the show immensely.

My eyes were open, but my ability to process the visual stimuli was being hampered by the mind-melting pressure coming from Robyn’s heat getting tighter around my cock. She was clenching her muscles so hard that even I could tell that it was a deliberate gesture. She was trying to milk me; she desperately wanted to feel the flood of me empty into her. She craved it, needed it, and was downright demanding it even if her ability to talk was being overwhelmed by the louder squeals and grunts falling from her lips.

I felt movement to the side of me, a set of larger breasts being pressed against my ribs before warm lips and hot breath washed over the side of my throat.

Fuck, these girls knew exactly how to press my buttons.

My cock lurched hard at the new sensation, and judging by the gasp and the suddenly harder bounces, Robyn felt it too. She was now hammering her hips onto me. The loud, wet slaps of our coupling rippled over the lake’s water as we raced towards our mutual high together.

“Yes, cum for him, baby,” a female voice softly said from the other side of me. My mind was too occupied to let me work out who it belonged to. “Look at him; look how much he loves your pretty little pussy. He wants to fuck his baby into you. He wants to make you a mom. Cum for him.”

“Oh god!” Robyn panted. “I’m going to cum. Fuck, please, Dan, fill me up! Holy shit! I’m going to...”

A scream ripped through the air. Robyn slammed down, and I braced myself for the clamp of her sex onto me, for the urgent convulsions that would pull me over the edge and suck every drop into her.

But it never came.

Even Hayley’s fingers had stopped.

Through my unfocused vision, I could see Robyn instinctively covering her chest as she, along with Hannah to the side of me, looked over toward Ray’s group with expressions of utter horror. I tried to blink my sight clear and leaned to the side to see what was going on.

Zoe and Caroline were scrambling backward through the water. Caroline was running, but Zoe was almost lying on her back, kicking her legs and clawing at the silt to get away from him. What looked to be three deep claw marks had raked down her side, and the skin from just below the swell of her breast to just above her hip was leaking dark crimson into the water.

Something was very wrong.

And it only took one look toward where Ray had been sitting to see what it was.

I knew what Ray looked like. Over the past few months, I had spent more time with him and the others than I had with any other person since I was an infant. Even my marriage to Sarah had been punctuated by work and our respective social lives. I had been with these people for twenty-four hours a day for months. I knew every single line and feature on his face as well as I knew my own. And one fact was unmistakable.

The thing I was looking at was not Ray.

He ... it ... whatever it was, was wearing Ray like a skin. The thing staggered to its feet like it was not used to being in the shape of a human; every movement and gesture was more like a nervous twitch. Its neck and head tilted and twisted as if having a minor seizure, its shoulders jerked, and flutters of muscle rippled under the skin of its chest. Its arms looked too long for its body, Ray’s original skin stretching dangerously tight over the sinewy muscles and fibers beneath it and his enormous hands - the skin there torn and shredded - ending in five, eight-inch long claws. One of which was still stained by the blood and tattered flesh from Zoe’s ribs.

His skin was a deathly pawl of grey, like the clouds on an overcast autumn day, but what really stood out, even over the gaunt and hollow torso, was his face. Everything about it was wrong. His cheeks looked drawn and dark, his hairline seemed to have moved several inches further up his forehead, and his nose seemed to have shrunk. Worse were his eyes. His bottom eyelid had folded over itself, creating a bright red ring around his bloodshot whites, which looked to be almost bugging out of their sockets.

His mouth, however, was, somehow, truly terrifying.

It was far too big for his face. The corners of his lips reached high onto his cheekbones in a grotesque and malevolent-looking grin, one filled with nothing except evil intent. But when his lips curled back into a macabre imitation of a smile, I could see that Ray’s pearly whites had morphed into yellow-crusted, sharpened fangs.

By the time I had taken all this in, Zoe and Caroline had scrambled back toward us. Katie and Amy, the first to react, had rushed out and started dragging Zoe toward the shore, either ignoring or not recognizing the danger they were now in. The creature’s head snapped toward them, a jerky, twitchy motion that was almost too fast for the eye to see. Robyn lifted off me in a heartbeat, and I shot to my feet, scooping her, Hannah, and Liz protectively behind me with Hayley.

The motion seemed to draw the creature’s attention away from the mad dash by Amy and Katie to pull Zoe clear. But as soon as his eyes locked onto me, his whole expression changed. The only way to describe it is by comparing how a predator looks at prey to how a cornered tiger looks at a threat. The look he gave the girls was almost akin to amusement, as if he was studying them before the strike that would end them. The look he shot at me, however, was pure, undiluted hostility. It was rage. I was not a meal to be feasted on but an enemy on the battlefield to be vanquished.

He launched himself at me in a series of gestures and movements almost too fast for the eye to follow. The human body was not made to move at those speeds; Ray’s drum-tight skin was already stretched to breaking point, but with the sudden increase in pressure as the muscles moved in ways they were never designed to handle, long, jagged tears ripped themselves along his arms, legs and across his already taut chest.

He covered half the distance between us in the space of only a few terrified heartbeats, his arm drawing back to deliver a strike that I had no doubt would kill me. As tattered as those muscles were, as they clung onto the bones of his arm, there was undeniable power in them. Fight or flight is a powerful motivator, but not exactly one that is hard to overcome; Flight would have meant leaving the women to their fates, and fighting would mean mine. It didn’t matter; there was no time to do anything. I just closed my eyes and prepared for the inevitable end.

Nothing happened.

The sounds around me seemed to stop. The screams of fear from the women behind me, the screams of pain from Zoe as she was dragged to the perceived safety of the shore, the splashing of the water as the creature formerly known as Ray lunged closer.

But still, nothing happened.

I felt myself frown. They say that lots of people were dead before they even realized it. Before they felt a thing. Although it was much better than the alternative, I didn’t really feel dead. For one thing, my feet were still wet from standing in the lake. It wasn’t the biggest hang-up in history, but if I was dead now, that meant my feet would stay wet, and spending eternity with wet feet didn’t sound like something to look forward to. Maybe this was that ‘life flashing before your eyes thing.’ I doubted having my eyes closed would affect that, and I wasn’t too bothered about missing it. I’d been there for most of it and wasn’t enormously impressed the first time around. I decided to wait a little longer.

Something still stubbornly refused to happen.

I huffed and peeked open an eye.

Four inches from my face were four very sharp, very dangerous-looking, and very frozen, blood-soaked talons. I squinted at them. I could almost see the air currents rippling around the bone-like blades as they slashed toward my head in a blow that would probably have cleaved it in half. Or into slices ... I don’t know ... that sort of logic was shoved aside by the unmistakable fact that they were frozen in mid-air. As was everything else around it. In fact, with a careful and hesitant look around the clearing, it was apparent that the only thing not caught in this snapshot moment in time was me.

I took a single large step backward, out of the swing of the creature, just in case my current state of fortune ended and the scything claw decided to start scything again. Truth be told, keeping my head there seemed like a rather bad idea.

Safely out of immediate harm, I felt a little more comfortable looking around properly. Ray’s face - or, more accurately, the face of the creature currently inhabiting Ray’s body - was twisted into a snarl of pure contemptuous rage. There was a hatred, an utter loathing, behind those bloodshot eyes. His dagger-like teeth had sliced through part of his lip as it curled back into the perpetual dangerous grimace it now wore.

But it was the sight beyond it that truly convinced me that this moment really was caught in time. Katie and Amy were dragging Zoe out of the lake, the spray and droplets of water, much of it stained crimson by the jagged wound along Zoe’s ribs, hung in mid-air. Caroline seemed to be levitating, too, her stride frozen in time as she ran toward the three of them while her terrified eyes watched Ray’s attack on me. The four women behind me were recoiling away from the sudden onset of violence, but in a gesture that immediately endeared her to me even more than she already was, Hayley was reaching for me while the other dragged her back. The suspended deluge around their feet was frozen in the air like the rest of the scene.

Even the waterfall, with its mosaic of droplet-refracted light, was just hanging there. Locked in that moment in time.

It was very offputting.

I scratched my head and turned my attention back to the creature formerly known as Ray. Ray was always a big guy, I was hardly small, and he was still a little bigger than me, but his distorted body now towered over mine. As torn and shredded as his skin was, the muscles beneath them held an undeniable power, and those talons looked big enough to eviscerate an ox. I could handle myself in a fight, but even I knew my limits.

So, options ... Running was the most obvious one. Dragging the girls one by one to the safety of the bunker and barricading ourselves in. It would take some doing, though. More than that, I had no idea how long this whole frozen-time thing was going to last, and knowing my luck, it would unfreeze when I was a mile away, leaving the girls yet to be moved at the mercy of Ray.

Moving Ray was the second option, but the same problems applied. His waking up while I was manhandling him somewhere would not be ideal. The issue of where to put him was reasonably straightforward; there were plenty of empty, lockable rooms to hold him within the bunker. I mean, I could obviously just hurl his ass off a cliff and into the sea, but this was Ray we were talking about. I wasn’t going to even consider killing him until Freja and Mother had a good look at him and told me categorically that there was no way of reversing whatever the fuck had happened to him.