Chapter 26: Breeding Beyond Biology
The silence after the storm was different this time. It was a held breath. Our bodies, reformed by the serum, by the births, by the relentless cycle of need, had settled into a new, impossible normal. The tool shed was no longer a shed. It was a nursery, a barracks, a den.
Our daughters—Anya, Bec, Cass, Dee—lay with us on the pallets of old blankets and burlap sacks. They were adults now, but adulthood on them was a surreal caricature. They’d grown fast, terrifyingly fast, each inheriting and amplifying the distortions of their origin. Anya, Ellie’s and mine, had my red hair but it cascaded over shoulders that sloped into breasts so colossal they made Ellie’s and mine look modest, each one a firm, pale globe the size of her own head, topped with a thick, perpetually erect nipple. Her waist was a mere whisper above hips that flared like a bell, leading to an ass so prodigious she had to lie on her side. And between her legs, the same signature tightness, a tell-tale pink seam that promised a vice-like grip.
They were all variations of that theme: absurdly top-heavy, impossibly bottom-heavy, with narrow waists that defied physics and a raw, hungry sexuality that hung in the air thicker than the smell of milk and come.
Cass, Nancy’s girl, ran a hand over the perfect, gargantuan curve of her own hip. “It aches,” she said, her voice a low, husky thing. “A deep, empty ache. I can feel it… ticking.”
“It’s ovulation,” Mary stated flatly from her corner. She was using a piece of charcoal to sketch rapid calculations on the plywood wall. “Simultaneous, synchronized. A biological imperative to propagate. Given our… enhanced fertility and their increased numbers, the statistical probability of conception per encounter is near certainty.”
“Oh, don’t start with the probabilities, Mary-bear,” Ellie murmured, her own hand absently stroking the drum-tight swell of her belly—still rounded from the last pregnancy, though the milk had slowed to a manageable, if copious, flow. Her artist’s eyes studied our four offspring, a mix of horror and fascination. “We all feel it. The question is, do we feed it?”
I sat with my back against the cold metal wall, Amy’s wrench still within reach. My practical mind, the engineer, was a ghost in a temple of flesh. Logic had no place here. Only need. A need so profound it felt like a sinkhole in my gut.
“We have eight of them now,” I said, my voice rough. “Two each.” We’d lured others, over the months. Called them in with our scent, our sounds. They were stronger now, too