A Map On Fire

Grant does not get the penthouse to himself.

He shuts the bedroom door and Piper is already there, shirt off, like she walked through the wall. Brooke is behind her in the flannel she never buttoned. They look at him like the pawn shop was a trailer and this is the movie.

“Master,” Piper says. Not a question.

Brooke’s mouth is on his neck before he answers. Piper’s hands are on his belt. Their increasing hunger is not patient anymore. It shows as hot spots spreading in the map. He can feel Ashlyn’s restlessness two rooms over. Leanne on two is pacing a hole in the floor. Mary is in the kitchen gripping a counter because she told herself she was the adult.

He regains focus long enough to get his pants down.

Piper ends up on her back on the bed, thighs open, that bare shiny slit he already knows. Brooke straddles his face and drops her pussy onto his mouth without asking. Salty. Wet. She holds the headboard and rides him while he fucks Piper in short deep strokes that make the frame knock the wall. Piper’s orgasm hits first, loud, her lower body shaking wildly. Brooke finishes on his tongue with her hand grabbing his hair. He pulls out of Piper, puts Brooke on her hands and knees, and slams into her from behind until she shakes and he fills her deep inside, marking his property, his hand on the back of her neck. He spanks her ass before pulling out and lying between both women. They cuddle as close as they can on each side of their master.

They stay on the bed like they are waiting for a third round.

Grant opens the map to five miles because if he does not look at something else he is going to take the whole floor.

Nine small.

Five bigger.

Two at a hundred.

The unreadable one, still east-northeast.

Then one of the nines flickers out.

It wasn’t a walk off the edge of the map. A point that was a man in a house off campus is just gone. Twenty-plus. His handful of women go loose in the same breath. Six tags, blank, scattered in a yard.

Grant goes still.

“What’s wrong, master?” Piper asks, still breathing hard.

“A man just died.”

Brooke lifts her head. “Who?”

“Not ours. One of the small ones.”

Mary is in the doorway. She felt the way his attention snapped. She is in a shirt and nothing else and she does not pretend she came for anything else.

“Is everything ok?”

He doesn’t answer her. He focuses harder.

A second twenty-plus goes. West. A gym. The man vanishes from the map. Eight women go loose in a parking lot.

“That’s two,” Grant says.

“Two what?”

“Two men who were on the map. Gone. Not walking. Not hiding. Gone.”

Mary pulls her shirt tighter like it will help.

“The hundreds?”

“Still sitting.”

Eve’s voice from the hall, already moving: “Master. I felt you flinch from the roof. What the fuck?”

“Stay on the roof. Watch the street. Don’t come down unless I say.”

“Yes, master.” She does not argue. That is new.

Grant watches the loose women. Twelve of them now, two clumps, no owner. He could run. He could take the bus.

If I leave the building for twelve, I miss the next one. If I stay, somebody else claims them.

A third twenty dies while he is thinking it.

Then one of the fifties. The triangle loses a corner.

The man by the highway flickers out like the first two. His women — Grant counts fast — nineteen — go blank in a spray along an on-ramp.

Mary swears.

“That’s not fucking random.”

“No.”

“Can you see what did it?”

Grant tries.

The map gives him people. Hearts. Weights. It does not show him anything else, not clearly anyway. There is a smear. A blur that is not a hundred and not a blank. It sits on the highway for half a second over the dead fifty and then it is not there. When he looks where it was, he is looking at asphalt and loose women.

“It’s like the unreadable one,” he says. “Except it moves. Fast. I can’t get a number. I can’t even get a body. It’s a smear.”

“A person?”

“I don’t know.”

Leanne is on two with a pistol in her hand. He can feel her. She does not come up. She waits.

Jose’s point in the garage ticks faster.

Grant does not have time to go downstairs and explain it to him.

The south hundred-plus moves.

Not toward Grant. Toward nothing Grant can name. Then he stops moving. Then he is gone.

A hundred-plus.

Gone.

The map blows a hole Grant can feel in his teeth. The women that belonged to that man — Grant’s count stutters — seventy, eighty, more — go loose in a camp south of the river road. A field of blank tags. Ownerless. Screaming, if he could hear that far.

“A hundred died in the south camp. His women are all loose in the field. No one is claiming them.”

Brooke sits up naked and grabs his arm.

“Master.”

“I know.”

Mary is already pulling pants on.

“We go.” Mary insists.

“We don’t know what killed them.”

“There are over a hundred women in a field.” She counters.

“There is a blur that just ate their master.”

They look at each other. The hunger in the room is still there, hot, underneath the fear. Piper’s hand is on his back. Brooke’s thigh is against his. Five hundred does not turn off because the map is on fire.

The second hundred, across the river, starts moving.

Grant watches it the way he watched Holt come up the block.

The blur is there and not there. A smear on the far bank. The hundred-plus holds. Then he doesn’t. The weight drops off the map like a floor giving way. Another field of over a hundred loose tags. Grant loses the count because the first field is already shifting, some of the women running, some clumping, some going still.

Eve, from the roof, shouts down the well:

“Street’s empty. I don’t see shit. What is happening?”

“Stay there,” Grant says. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. “Do not leave the roof.”

“Yes, master.”

The triangle has two corners left. One of them goes while Eve is still answering. School. Fifty-plus. Twelve women loose in a gym.

The smear moves through the school and off the map’s clean edge and back on again closer to campus.

Toward the nines that are left.

Grant stands up.

Piper reaches for him.

“Please don’t go, master.”

“I’m not going to the smear.” He looks at Mary. “If I chase it I might not come back. If I sit here, though, I watch men get deleted and their women run out of range.”

“Then we pick a field,” Mary says.

“And the close one. Campus. Twelve in a gym. We can be there and back before that thing decides to come here.” Grant adds. “Jose stays. Leanne stays. Eve stays. You, me, Zoya. Bus. In and out. We do not look for the smear.”

“Yes, master.”

It costs her nothing now. The word is how she obeys and serves him.

They do not dress for a war.

They dress for speed. Mary in the same shirt, pistol. Zoya, shotgun, jaw tight. Grant, bare hands. The web is a mess of heat and fear. Half the building wants to follow him into the bedroom. The other half wants to follow him into a gym. He shuts both down by leaving.

Jose has the engine on before Grant hits the garage.

“I heard your map went crazy, but I don’t know all the details,” Jose says. “Tell me we are not doing something stupid.”

“Gym. Campus. Twelve women. Then home.”

“Copy. If I see a blur I am running over it.”

“If you see a blur you turn around.”

“Yes, master. Boss. Fuck.”

The gym is six minutes away if Jose does not care about debris in the road. He doesn’t.

Grant watches the smear while they roll.

It is on one of the nine. Then he is gone. Then the smear is two blocks over. It does not walk. It does not drive. It is a speed the map can’t draw.

The unreadable man is in the same place as before. He still has not moved. East-northeast. Same building. Same blank where a number should be. The smear has not gone that way. The smear is eating the ones Grant could read.

It leaves the one I can’t count. That’s worse.

The gym doors are chained from the inside and already broken. Zoya kicks what’s left. The twelve are in the basketball court, loose, loud, some with pipes, one with a starter pistol that will not save her.

“Mine.”

The blast takes the court. Two hundred feet. Through bleachers. Twelve lock.

Names in a pile. Grant does not catch all of them. Noor will later.

548.

“Master,” they say, overlapping, the word already there.

“Bus. Now. Do not look for anybody else.”

Mary covers the door. Zoya shoves the last one up the aisle. Jose is rolling before the door latches.

The smear is on the west side of campus when they leave. A twenty dies. Grant does not turn the bus.

“Home,” he says.

“On it,” Jose says, and means it.

The tower is still theirs.

Leanne meets them in the garage.

“Twelve,” Grant says. “Gym. That’s it. We are not going south. We are not going across the river.”

“How many men left.”

Grant opens the five miles.

The small ones are thinning. Four left. The triangle is now one corner. The two hundreds are holes. The unreadable man sits untouched.

The smear is a smudge near the river road, over the first field of loose women. It does not claim them. It does not stay. It moves through them like they are fog.

“It’s not taking the girls,” Grant says. “Just the men.”

Mary’s mouth is white.

“So it’s hunting owners.”

“Or hunting anything that reads on its map. I don’t know. I can’t see it clearly.”

Piper is on the landing. Brooke behind her. Ashlyn. Cindy. The new twelve. The hunger is still there, piled on top of the fear, stupid and loud. Somebody — Nell — says “master” like a plea and not a title.

Grant puts a hand on the wall.

“Nobody leaves the building. Eve stays on the roof. Two stays armed. If the smear turns toward this block I will know before it gets here and we do not go outside to see what it looks like. We hold.”

“Yes, master,” from a dozen mouths.

Jose, quieter: “And me? What if it kills any men it finds?”

“You stay in the garage. If I say go, you go. If I don’t, you sit.”

“Ok, but I’m hiding in the back of it.”

Grant nods.

He then steps to his women on the top floor.

In the penthouse he opens the map.

Four small.

One fifty.

No hundreds.

The unreadable man.

The smear moves, skips, and is gone off the clean edge of five miles — then back, south, over the big field of loose tags it did not touch.

Mary stands in the door with two plates she is not going to make him eat yet.

“You got twelve. You didn’t chase it. I’m calling that not dying.”

“It’s wiping the board,” Grant says. “And it left the one I can’t read.”

“Then we don’t go east either.”

“Not tonight.”

“Not tonight, master.”

She sets the plates down. Her hands shake. She comes to the bed anyway, climbs into his lap like the adulting can wait one hour, and kisses him like she is starving and angry about it.

Her insatiable need does not care that the map is on fire.

She pulls her shirt off. He lets her. Then she gets down from his lap and onto her knees while removing his pants. For a few minutes the only thing in the room is Mary giving him a passionate blowjob while the smear hunts men. After he finishes in her mouth, she swallows it all hungrily. She then wipes a drop of his cum from her chin with her finger and sucks it clean.

He then watches the five miles until his eyes hurt.

The last fifty goes.

The unreadable man does not move.

Only the smear is moving now.

And Grant still can’t see who or what it is.