Chapter 32: JA01-Epsilon, Day 5, concluded

Steve, Antonia, and Beverly moved into the room. Both of the women who had greeted them seemed to be in shock.

Antonia and Beverly helped each of the women to a chair, and got them seated. Beverly did a quick vitals check, and said they both seemed to be OK; no danger of physical shock.

Antonia and Steve had already started moving towards the scream. They found a petite brunette staring into a room that corresponded to Steve's back in their home. Steve looked inside, and then turned to Antonia. "Toni, take care of her; get Bev to look her over. I'm going to check the scene. In the event that anyone has experience at a crime scene, they can come in, otherwise keep them back."

Antonia nodded, as Bev came up. Steve pointed to the woman in Antonia's arms, and said, "Check her out please; I'm going in there to look around. I think we've found our suicides, though."

Steve entered the room, and closed the door behind him. A slender young man lay on the bed, his wrists sliced open, a large dried bloodstain under each one. The cuts on his right wrist weren't that deep, but he'd carefully cut the veins while leaving enough tendons intact to let him slice the left wrist to the bone. Death must have been quick and quiet, because all the blood was under the wrists, not splashed across the bed.

There was a note on the bedside, but getting to it was going to be tricky. The body of a woman lay alongside the bed, in another puddle of blood. She'd obviously died more recently; the bloodstains hadn't darkened the way the stains under the man had. She'd apparently found the man, then used his knife to cut her throat. She'd bled out quickly, but it hadn't been as easy for her; there was a lot of blood on the bed that must have come from her, and the wall on the other side of her was also sprayed.

Steve managed to work his way to the note, and he retrieved it and got back out before he looked at it.

The note was hand-written, in a small, precise hand. "I can not continue," it said, "I'm sorry to abandon you all, but no matter what you do or say, I can never give you what you want, and now one of you has decided to take it, and I can not live with that. I can not forgive her, but I hope you can. Johnny."

A shaky scrawl appeared across the bottom of the note. "I never meant to hurt him, I swear it. Please, believe me. I can never face any of you again, and I have nowhere else to go. Roberta."

Steve shook his head. Unless he missed his guess, Johnny had been gay, and Roberta and possibly some of the others hadn't been able to accept that, and had tried to 'change' him. It sounded like Roberta had tried the direct approach, and it had been too much for Johnny. When Roberta had returned for more, she'd been unable to live with what she found.

He turned and left the room. The hallway was empty, but he heard voices coming from the common room, so he went that way.

He found Toni and Bev sitting on a couch, supporting the sobbing young woman who had screamed, as they explained who they were and how they came to be there.

When Steve approached, the tall woman who had greeted them looked up, and said, with tears in her eyes, "They're dead, aren't they. Johnny and Roberta are dead." It could have been a question, but the tone was flat, and heavy with grief.

Steve nodded. "I've never met either of them, of course, but there are a man and a woman, both dead, each apparently by their own hands. Johnny went first, and Roberta found him, then took her own life. There was a note. Johnny left it, and Roberta added her last words to the bottom."

"The notes were addressed to you all," Steve continued, "at least implicitly, but it might not be the best time to read it." He nodded to the young woman as he said the last.

"No," she said, through her sobs, "No, I need to know. Tell us, please."

Steve looked around for guidance from the other women, and got nods, so he read the note aloud. When he finished, everyone was crying, and a few of the women were silently sobbing.

Steve motioned Toni to one side, and sat down where she'd been sitting, and pulled the woman who'd discovered the bodies into his arms. He stroked her back and shoulders, and whispered reassurances into her ear, until she began to calm.

She lifted her face from his now-soaked shoulder and said, "Thank you. Thank you for holding me, it really helped. It was so awful. Why did it happen?"

Steve looked at her, then at the others, and then back to her. "Unless I'm misreading the situation, Johnny was gay. Apparently somebody refused to believe that, and managed to get close enough to him to take advantage of him somehow. She got what she wanted, but the act so disgusted him that he couldn't live with himself, and so he slit his wrists. Roberta found him, and was distraught, and blamed herself, and she cut her throat.

"When the aliens contacted us, they said that there had been two suicides, and that the rest of you were at risk as well, but they implied that it was the suicides that had upset you. If you only just found out about Johnny and Roberta, I'm not sure what they were referring to."

Steve belatedly realized he didn't know any of the women's names. Toni picked up on his confusion, and took the lead.

"I should have introduced you all to Steve before this," she said. "This is Steve Miller, the man that Bev and I and eight other women are proud to call husband. He's kind, and tender, and a great lover. He's also the strongest man I've ever met; not physically, though he's no slouch there either, but strong of heart. I've never seen him angry, but you can tell that he's a fierce defender of the weak.

"Steve, I'd like to introduce you to the ladies. Starting with the sweetie in your arms, we have Donna Wilson. Lana Schmidt is the tall brunette that first greeted us, and Dianne Jones was with her. Monique Dubois is next", pointing to a black-haired fair-skinned beauty with a nice ass.

"Jessica Arnold," she said next, indicating a sandy-haired woman with long, slender legs.

"Angela Lucas," pointing to a slender blonde of medium height.

"Lucille Brown," a dark-skinned African-American.

"Terri Jones," another black-haired beauty, with lush tits and a firm ass.

"And last but not least, Michelle Moran," a tall, robust-looking brunette.

Toni turned back to Steve, and said, "As to the stress levels, it had become obvious to everyone but Roberta that Johnny was in fact gay, and was not going to turn straight no matter how hard they tried. What was and is driving their stress levels is the fact that they had tried, before they saw how it was hurting him, and that Roberta refused to give up.

"Michelle told us that she saw Roberta leave Johnny's room last night looking insufferably smug, but she refused to say why. She didn't think anything of it until she heard Donna's scream.

"Donna says that she wanted to invite Johnny to breakfast, and she wanted to apologize to him for all the attempts she'd made to get him interested. She went to knock on the door, and it opened. You know what she saw, and it was too much for her."

Steve nodded. "I completely understand. It was hard enough for me, and I don't even know them. It must be awful for you, given how you all must have bonded over the past several days."

Jessica snorted. "I wouldn't call it 'bonded'," she said somewhat disdainfully. "I get along with all of them, and could count most of them as friends, but we haven't 'bonded.' I'd gotten pretty close to Johnny, since I guessed almost immediately that he wasn't going to be contributing to our 'species surviving this event' as that disaster movie put it. So I didn't try to flash him, or snuggle up to him, or any of that other crap. I'll give everyone here credit, it didn't take them long to 'get it, ' and once they did, they straightened right up.