Chapter 16

Meghan was still pretty sick and feverish for the next feeding, but she was also in the mood for something other than Sapphic love for a change.

"I want some cock," she insisted as they took their clothes off for the post-sunset romp. "And not that friggin' fake cock either. I want a real flesh and blood cylinder that gets warm and hard, that pulses, that spits something hot and sticky out when it's done." She looked over at Ken. "Do you know anyone who might have such a thing?"

It turned out he did. He mounted his wife in the missionary position and went to work on her. The plan had been for him to spend inside of Meghan and Jo feed from him first, but it didn't quite work out that way. Enough of his virility and enthusiasm had returned that before he was even close to orgasm, Meghan started displaying the unmistakable signs of her own impending explosion.

"Well, I guess we do Meghan first tonight," Jo said with a shrug as she shifted her mouth from kissing the back of Ken's shoulders to kissing Meghan's neck near the Sweet Spot. "Let it go, Meg ... keep pounding her, Ken."

They obeyed and soon Meghan was in the throes and being fed upon. Ken then watched with envy as his semi-catatonic wife was fed first from Jo's spurting wrist. His mouth watered as he saw her swallowing the precious arterial blood.

After a brief rest, Ken got his turn. He sat on the edge of the bed and Jo sat beside him, stroking him with her talented fingers. His orgasm came and she bit down on his neck. By now he was not just used to the sting of her feeding teeth but enjoyed the pain immensely, not only because it was erotic (although it was sublimely erotic) but because it was the harbinger of his own feeding.

"Okay," Jo said, smiling as she held up her scalpel. "Are you ready?"

"Yes ... give it to me," he begged.

She cut herself open and put the wound to his lips. He drank of her greedily, sucking as much of her lifeblood as he could before the incision sealed back up. As always, when it did close up, he mourned its loss and wished for more.

"That's all you get for now," Jo told him apologetically when she finally took her wrist away from his mouth. "Now get downstairs and see Dick ... right now."

"Okay," he agreed, feeling the usual post-feeding depression, even as he felt the glorious blood warming his stomach, filling the hole in it.

Dick wanted to give Ken an immediate post-feeding exam in order to visually verify and document he was displaying self-healing properties beyond the capabilities of a normal human being. He had actually wanted to have Ken and Jo perform their sexual activity and the feedings down in his exam room so he could watch everything, but Ken had balked at this. He had lost a good portion of his modesty in the last ten nights but tearing one off on an exam room table while a four hundred year old cognate doctor watched and scratched notes on his observations was still considerably outside of his expanded comfort zone.

He did, however, make his way downstairs as quickly as possible, not even bothering to put clothing on first. Nudity, since the start of the propagation, had become pretty much the norm among the three participants, what with the sex and the blood and the vomit and the sleeping and the feeding and the frequent showering. In truth, it did not even occur to him to grab a robe as he made his journey. And, of course, he ran smack into Gertie and Julie Ann, the cognate cop currently on duty, as he cut through the kitchen. They were both fully dressed and working at the stove on what seemed to be a spaghetti sauce of some sort. They looked up as he entered, neither one of them so much as batting an eye at his state.

"Hi, Ken," Gertie greeted, giving him a grandmotherly smile. "You're looking good tonight. Much healthier."

"Uh..." Ken started, his hands automatically going down to cover his genitals, which were still wet and sticky from the recent discharge they'd experienced.

"It's good to see you up and about," said Julie Ann. "The smell of this sauce must be torture to you, huh?"

"Uh ... well ... I ... I didn't even..." He could feel his face flushing. "I mean ... yeah, it smells great."

"How's Meghan doing?" asked Gertie. "I assume she's been fed by now?"

"She's uh ... yeah, doing good," he blurted. "Still under when I ... you know ... headed down."

"Hopefully she'll get over the vomiting in a night or two," said Julie Ann. "When I went through my propagation I threw up will into night thirteen."

"I was an early bloomer," Gertie said proudly. "I didn't vomit after the eleventh night."

"Lucky you," Julie Ann said enviously. "Although not as lucky as Ken. You got to skip the whole immune response entirely, didn't you?"

"Uh ... yeah, that's what it's ... it's looking like," Ken said.

"Whoever truly blessed you," Julie Ann said.

"Yes ... yes He did," Ken agreed. "Uh ... well, I'd better get into Dick's office. Nice ... uh ... talking to you two."

"Yes, you go see Dick now," Gertie said. She walked over and kissed him gently on the cheek. She smelled of fresh garlic and basil. "And you don't have to cover yourself like that. Believe me, you don't have anything we haven't seen a hundred thousand times before."

"Well, maybe only fifty thousand for me," Julie Ann said with a chuckle.

"Uh ... right," Ken said. He forced himself to take his hands away. He walked with as much dignity as he could muster through the kitchen and into the hall that led to Dick's office.

Dick was waiting for him, his various instruments laid neatly out on a stainless steel table on wheels. "There you are," he said, his voice a bit impatient. "How long since you fed?"

"Uh ... maybe three minutes," Ken told him.

Dick frowned a little, clearly irritated, but he nodded. "No time to lose. Hop up on the table."

Ken hopped up on the table. Dick immediately reached down, grabbed Ken's testicles, lifted them up, and shoved a thermometer into his rectum. Ken winced at the intrusion but didn't comment.

"That's it," Dick said, smiling as he recorded the reading. "One hundred and two point six—and rising."

"That's how hot I am?" Ken asked. "I don't feel like I have a fever."

"Do you feel the draining sensation in your buttocks and abdomen?" Dick asked him.

Now that he was past the embarrassment of talking to Gertie and Julie Ann, he was able to concentrate on what his body was feeling. Yes, there was a definite draining sensation in those areas. "I do," he told Dick. "It's not as intense as it was last night, but it's there."

"That is your body utilizing raw minerals and chemicals from your fat storage areas and your liver to replace damaged parts," Dick said. "That sensation coupled with the rise in temperature without other febrile response is strongly indicative of a cognate body under construction."

"So ... so that means I'm really becoming cognate?" Ken asked.

"I can't say with one hundred percent certainty just yet," Dick said. "But having you report the healing sensation combined with what happened to your teeth and your tattoo last night makes me about ninety percent sure."

"Those are pretty good odds," Ken said.

"Uh huh," Dick agreed, "And what's happening to your tattoo right now makes me ninety-nine point nine percent sure."

"Right now?" Ken said. He looked at his upper left arm and gave a little gasp of surprise. His tattoo had faded considerably after the last feeding, but now, it was fading right before his eyes. All of the color and shading was gone from it. It looked like a dim sketch penciled in haste with a dull piece of graphite. And then the lines themselves began to break up and grow fainter.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Dick said. "Watching the cognate regenerative powers at work?"

Ken was too dumbfounded to speak. He could now no longer even tell what the tattoo had been. The faded lines had broken up so much the picture they'd formed now lacked any sort of definition. He continued to stare and within a minute the last remnants of the ink were gone completely, leaving his arm completely bare. It was like the tattoo had never been there. He couldn't help but mourn its loss.

"Try not to give it too much thought," Dick advised. "It is nothing but a remnant of a life that is now over. Think of it as a sign that your new life is beginning."

Ken nodded and forced himself to look away from his arm. He put his eyes back on Dick. "I can still feel the draining," he said. "And I feel this weird tingling sensation."

"Where do you feel it?" Dick asked.

"Everywhere," he said. "It's all over my body. It's kind of a cross between warmth and that pins and needles sensation you get when your hand or your leg has fallen asleep."

"Is it strong or weak?"

"Weak I suppose," Ken said. "I only notice it when I'm not paying attention to something else."

Dick smiled and nodded his head. "That's exactly what I wanted to hear," he said. "There is no doubt remaining in my mind that you're on your way to becoming cognate. That tingling warmth you are feeling is your body repairing itself to optimum efficiency."

"Repairing itself?"

"Right," Dick said. "Repair is the first major step toward the transformation of a human body into a cognate. You are utilizing Josephine's blood proteins and your own stored raw materials to put your body back into prime shape. All of your arteries, veins, muscles, tendons, bones, nerves, and internal organs are being repaired of all the inherent damage your forty-two years of life have put upon them. You are being transformed first into an ideal human specimen. Once that is done, the virus will begin to mutate your actual DNA and turn all of those newly repaired human parts into cognate parts."

"My internal organs," Ken said slowly. "Does that mean my ... my cancer... ?"

"Is probably either completely gone by now, or, at the very least, has been reduced down to little more than benign lumps that will soon be absorbed and utilized for their proteins."

Ken at first couldn't even credit what Dick was telling him. There really was no emotional precedent on how to feel in such a situation. His cancer was gone? Gone as in... gone? No longer a threat? The malignant growths on his liver and pancreas, those collections of rogue cells that had dominated his thoughts these last four months, that had been poised to kill him in a horrible, painful manner ... they were just gone?

"Kind of makes all the vomiting worthwhile, doesn't it?" Dick asked. "My rather well-educated guess is that the burning you told me about—that burning you experienced after your pre-sunrise feeding yesterday, just before you fell asleep for eleven hours—was the healing mechanism repairing your liver and pancreas. Your body would have identified those as the most pressing concerns and dedicated every ounce of available energy and material to repairing them first."

"That sensation was right over my right upper abdomen," Ken said.

"Exactly," Dick said. "While you were lying there basking in self-doubt and worry, your body was dissolving those tumors and rebuilding your organs. It's no wonder you passed out and stayed down until the next feeding. It's no wonder you were so thirsty when you woke up. You were in the process of undergoing a miracle."

Ken shook his head, still trying to grasp this with his mind. "I keep waiting for you to say 'but' or 'as long as' or 'pending further tests' or something like that," he said.

"Well ... there are a few of those, I'm afraid," Dick said.

"There are?" Ken said, feeling a little worm of dread return.

"Life is like that," Dick said. "Especially the life of a cognate-to-be in mid-propagation. Let's start with the 'but' first, shall we? Your cancer is probably healed, but ... it would come back within a month if you did not finish the propagation—even if Josephine didn't have to eliminate you to protect the Subterfuge. As we told you during the Disquisition, it's an all or nothing deal. Going this far in the propagation and then stopping would not serve to heal you, it would only buy you a month or two."

"So the propagation can still fail?" Ken asked.

"Right," Dick said. "It must be carried out according to the schedule until your cognate teeth appear and you lose the urge for Josephine's blood and start craving the blood of others. Until that point, the propagation can still fail and will still fail if you do not continue to be fed upon during orgasm and to feed from your parent twice per night. That is the 'as long as'. Your cancer will be healed and will not return as long as you continue with the propagation."

"I understand," Ken said. "And 'pending further tests'?"

"Right," said Dick. "I am completely sure of my diagnosis of you, but pending further tests—which I will start to perform now—I cannot be officially completely sure, if you get my meaning. So ... why don't we get started?"

"Why don't we?" Ken agreed, actually glad to be poked and prodded for once since it was likely to yield good news.

The physical exam took almost thirty minutes. Dick then drew several vials of blood from Ken's left arm, looking at some of it under a microscope, spinning some of it in his centrifuge and then putting it into a portable diagnostic machine. While the machines were running, Ken felt an itching, burning sensation inside of his left elbow. When he looked, he saw, without much surprise, that the tiny hole made by the needle puncturing his flesh had healed up and disappeared.

"Okay," Dick said, obviously pleased, once everything was done. "I think I like what I see here."

"Yeah?" said Ken.

"Indeed. Your weight is still stable at 175—about what I would expect. Your skin color and eye color have improved remarkably. You are no longer displaying the jaundice you had only forty-eight hours ago. I do not have the ability to check your liver enzymes, but my guess is that they are normal."

"So my liver..."

"Would appear to be functioning normally," Dick said. "Your pancreas seems to be back in the game as well. Your blood sugar reading was sixty-eight milligrams per deciliter, the low end of normal and the absolute lowest it has been since I began examining you. Your urine shows no sign of ketones, although it has at every previous urinalysis. Furthermore, you report no pain and show no grimacing when the area is palpated."

"So ... I really am healing?"

"You really are healing," Dick said. "Your blood count is also consistent with this particular stage of the propagation. Red blood cells are abnormally high and many of them are damaged—the sign of cognate self-destructive properties starting to make themselves known. Your white blood cell count and your platelet count are almost non-existent—self-healing bodies have no need of white blood cells or platelets. My guess is that within a few nights I will no longer be able to analyze your blood at all as it will begin disappearing just like a proper cognate's blood should. You, my friend, are, in my official professional opinion, well on your way to the final transformation." He held out his hand. "Congratulations, Ken. We pulled you through this."

Ken shook with him and felt tears forming in his eyes. He was going to live. He was really going to live. "Thank you, Dick," he said. "I know I'm not supposed to say that, but I have to. Thank you for everything you've done and are doing."

"It's my job, youngster," Dick said, clapping him on the back. "A very enjoyable part of my job at that."

"What is?" asked Meghan, who came walking into the room holding onto Jo for support. She was dressed in her bathrobe (although Jo was still nude) and looking pale and sick. Her hair was wet from a shower and she smelled of body wash, shampoo, and recent vomit.

"Hello, Meghan," Dick said. "Hello, Josephine. I was just giving Ken some good news. By all indications he is well on his way to a successful propagation. His cancer is most likely gone, and his liver and pancreas are returning to normal function."

This put a broad smile on Meghan's sick face. "The cancer is gone?" she asked happily. "Oh, Ken ... that's wonderful!" She turned to Dick. "Are you sure?"

"The lab values and the physical exam are consistent with it," Dick assured her. "And if you'll look at his left arm, you can see that something is conspicuously absent."

Meghan looked and her eyes widened. "Your tattoo! It's completely gone!" She reached out and touched the flesh where it had been. "Did it just ... just fade away right before your eyes?"

"Right before our eyes," Ken said. "I kind of miss it, to tell the truth, but, as Dick pointed out, it's a small price to pay."

"Wow," Meghan said, continuing to rub and feel the area, still trying to comprehend it was really gone.

"Uh ... Meg, hon," Ken said, embarrassed. "You might want to stop doing that."

"What?" she asked, unsure what he was talking about ... at first. She then looked down and saw that even this innocent, asexual caress was having a definite effect on a certain part of her husband's anatomy. It was stretching out and getting ready for what it assumed would be a little more action. "Oh ... my," she said with a giggle. "I guess maybe I'd better." She took her hand away. The swelling did not go down.

Dick chuckled. "I think I'll add greatly increased sexual drive to my medical report on you as well, Ken," he said.

Ken wasn't sure if he was kidding or not. He didn't ask. He simply blushed and tried to will away the now-turgid erection. He could already tell it was going to take a lot of will.

"So ... on that note," Dick said, turning to the two ladies. "You're here for your exam?"

They were. Ken stuck around as Dick weighed them, poked and prodded them, questioned them, and drew blood from them. In the end, he declared that Jo was losing a little more weight than he really cared for but was still healthy enough and that Meghan, while still losing weight as well, seemed to be losing it at a slower rate these last three days.

"It sounds like you might stop sicking up the blood soon, Meghan," he told her. "The fact that you were able to keep it down for almost forty minutes after coming out of the amnesiac is encouraging."

"Thank God," she said with a grimace. She looked at Ken with pleasant natured sourness. "You have no idea how lucky you are that you got to escape most of this."

"Hey, I did my share of barfing too," Ken reminded her.

"But you never had to deal with the shakes and the swollen glands and the chills," she said. "You don't know misery until you've been through that."

"Jesus H. Christ," Ken said, exasperated. "You're going to hold that shit against me for the next five hundred years, aren't you? We're going to sitting on a goddamn space station orbiting a moon of Saturn in the year 2450 and you're still going to be saying 'but you didn't have to go through the immune response', aren't you?"

"Goddamn right I am," Meghan said with a laugh. "What kind of wife would I be if I didn't?"

"All right you two," Jo said, shaking her head in amusement. "Why don't you save it for the space station?" She turned to Dick. "On a more serious note, have you dug up any information on why Ken didn't experience an immune response? Or why he began to show signs of successful propagation early? It would seem those two things are related, right?"

"Right," Dick said, nodding. "And as a matter of fact, I did receive some interesting information from Ian Goodhall, one of the Propagation Council members from South Africa. It seems Ken's early symptomology and lack of immune response is not entirely unprecedented after all."

"It's not?" Ken asked. "I thought you said there was nothing in the medical files about it."

"Nothing in the Western World Cognate medical files from the last three hundred years," Dick corrected. "Ian, however, worked and lived for many years in Johannesburg, which is quite close to some of the more notorious sub-Saharan Africa nations. He tells me that in both Mozambique and Zimbabwe during the early years of the AIDS crisis, there were reports of numerous propagations of late stage AIDS patients by cognate who wanted to save beloved humans from death. AIDS, as you know, is a disease that destroys the human immune system and renders it incapable of fighting off viruses, bacteria, and other malignant invaders. In many of these AIDS propagations—as Ian calls them—the humans did not display any sort of immune response and propagated about a week faster than an average human. The reasoning behind this is simple: You can't have an immune system response if you've got no immune system."

"So the virus just goes in and runs rampant through the human's body?" Ken asked.

"Exactly," Dick said. "That allows everything to happen faster because the virus is able to replicate unchecked. It's so simple I'm almost ashamed of myself for not having realized that this was going on. Of course, in my own defense, I have always been taught that propagation had to include an immune response and I guess I subconsciously assumed that it was a necessary part of the process. And I also had no reason to believe that your immune system was that compromised, Ken. You had pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to the liver. You had not undergone any sort of chemotherapy so I didn't consider your immune system much at all."

"So why was my immune system compromised?" Ken asked.

"The tumors must have spread to your lymph system as well," Dick said. "Not only had they spread there, but they'd established themselves enough to have knocked your entire immunity out, not just near the primary tumors, but everywhere. That is why you suddenly seemed to get worse just as you arrived here. You were even sicker than we'd first thought."

It was Meghan who first caught the ramifications of this. "So ... so ... if we wouldn't have started the propagation when we did..."

"Ken wouldn't have made it this far," Dick said. "If another week had gone by he would have been too sick, too weak to make it to the self-repair phase. The stress of the vomiting and the malnutrition would have killed him."

It was after the pre-sunrise feeding on the thirteenth night that Meghan first held the blood down after drinking it from Jo's wrist. She was miserably nauseous, of that there was no doubt, but she held on, her eyes tightly closed, her fists clenched, her breathing deep and regular. Forty-five post-amnesiac minutes went by and she never left the bed. Finally, she drifted off to sleep, apparently without realizing it.

"She did it," Jo said, very pleased as she looked down at her soon-to-be child with love. "She held it down. We're on the downside of this thing now, Ken. We really are."

Ken was looking pensively down at his wife. He had already been fed from and had fed. He could feel the warmth and the draining at work within him, the mild, underlying thrum that signaled an ongoing major overhaul instead of an emergency repair. He shook his head a little. "This is all really happening, right?" he asked.

Jo reached up and caressed the back of his neck gently. There was no confusion regarding what he was talking about in her eyes. "Yes," she told him. "It's really real. You're really going to be cognate in another week and a half or so. You're really going to be slinking around and feeding from the necks of humans."

"I'm really not going to age," he whispered.

"You're really not going to age," Jo assured him. "You're going to live a long, fruitful life full of eroticism and adventure and you're going to have Meghan at your side through it all."

He sighed, shaking his head a little more. "That's what keeps throwing me for a loop," he said. "A little over a month ago, I was preparing for death. I had mentally accepted that I was going to die and die soon, but now ... now I'm not. Now I'm not only going to live, but I'm not even going to age. I'm going to be perpetually young and strong and sexually active. Do you have any idea how strange that makes me feel?"

"Yes," Jo said. "I do."

"You do?"

"Maybe not to the same degree that you do, but every cognate who ever lived has had a basic understanding of the concept you're describing. Most of us didn't cut it as close as you did, that is true, but all of us went from the life of a mere mortal looking at maybe forty more years of life at the most—the last twenty-five of which would have been lived in misery and pain—to a theoretical immortal who will never get old at all and who will not have to die until he or she chooses. It's a notion that takes a while to grasp, that the human mind is simply not programmed to take seriously even when looking at the reality of it. The very illogic of it makes it seem like a dream."

"Yes!" Ken said, nodding excitedly. "I've been feeling like that a lot ever since my dental work popped out of my mouth and Dick told me the propagation was working. One part of my brain knows this is real but another part ... the biggest part, keeps insisting that this can't be real, that cognate don't exist, and that I'm probably in a drug induced stupor in some hospital bed back in Sacramento having some sort of end-of-life delusion."

"It's no delusion, Ken," Jo told him.

"How do I know that?" he asked.

Jo thought for a moment. "Well ... I can give you the closest thing available to proof if you need it."

"You can?"

She gave him an accommodating smile. "Let me see your hand," she said.

"Why?" he asked, concerned. "You're not going to chop it off, are you?"

"No, we'll save that for your own Disquisition in a hundred years or so. This will be just a little demonstration."

Hesitantly, he held out his hand to her. She took it in hers and then, with her other hand, brought up the razor knife she used to cut her wrist for feeding. Before Ken could even fully comprehend what she was doing, she drew the blade across the tip of his index finger, slicing his skin. It was a small cut, perhaps a quarter of an inch in length and only deep enough for a drop or two of blood to well up. It was little more than a paper cut, really, but, like a paper cut, it stung quite deeply.

"Ow!" Ken barked, instinctively jerking his hand from her grasp. "What the hell did you do that for?"

"Did it hurt?" Jo asked him.

"Of course it hurt!" he said. "You just cut my freakin' finger!" He picked up one of the towels that were always kept handy on the propagation bed, found a clean spot, and dabbed at the blood.

"If it hurts, it's not a dream, right?" Jo asked.

He thought that over for a second, stunned by the simplicity of the argument. The pain was still there. It was sharp, intense, throbbing, and, most important, it was real. "I ... I suppose you're right," he finally said.

"And look at your finger now," she said. "Watch it. Feel it."

He did as instructed. Sure enough, within ten or fifteen seconds, the pain in the finger faded away and was replaced by the now familiar warmth of his flesh healing. While still stained with a small smear of his blood, the cut closed up and disappeared.

"If the pain was real," Jo told him, "then the healing had to be real too, right?"

He thought this one over. Logic suggested she was correct. "Yes," he said.

She took his hand again and brought the healed finger to her lips. She kissed it and then put the hand back in his lap. "It's real, Ken. Everything is real."

Two more nights went by. Meghan kept the blood down at both feedings. She was still a long way from actually craving it, but it no longer had the power to make her vomit. This meant her body was now able to use most of it for nourishment. She stopped losing weight. Her fever faded away while she slept off the post-sunset feeding on the second night and it did not return. She actually began to get some of her energy back.

Ken continued to feel the draining and the warmth. Now it seemed to be with him all the time, not just in the hour or so after feeding from Jo's wrist. Interestingly, Ken was the first one to notice that he was starting to look younger. The change was so gradual that Jo and Meghan, who saw him constantly, absorbed the change without realizing it. Even Gertie, Harold, Dick, and the various cognate cops who pulled shifts in the house failed to detect the change at first. But Ken, who had developed a dislike of scrutinizing his reflection in the mirror as a natural part of his cancer, suddenly did just that on the second morning after brushing his teeth.

"Wow," he whispered, awed by what he was seeing. The skin of his face looked tighter and smoother. The small collection of crow's feet that had sprung up in the corner of his eyes in the last five years was gone. So were the so-called wisdom lines that had been cropping up on his forehead. His lips seemed fuller, his cheeks leaner, the flesh of his chin and upper neck solid looking and muscled instead of slightly sagging. It was not a dramatic change—not yet anyway—but it looked like he'd lost maybe ten years. He didn't mention his observations to anyone. This was partially for fear of being thought vain but mostly out of curiosity. He wanted to see how long it would take before the changes became obvious to those who saw him every day.