Red Spikes Read Online Free Page A

smelled the sparky smell from the wires, and the poor-food funk of bachelor, and the sweetness of morning garden; the last star faded with a smell just like a drop of water drying off sunny carvenstone.
    Then they jumped in among us.
    ‘Never!’ someone screamed.
    We ran – except we weren’t we any more. Each was a lone dottie, without help or hero, a tiny sole vulnerable, running across the rocks, bounding up among the carvens, smelly shadows at her tail. I seen one of those paws dash a little babby-head to the rock, like breaking an egg. I turned and seen that mother taking it, all teeth and trembling, the bloke behind her keeping her in place with his claws, working at her all intent. They’re everywhere, the filth, the grey filth, each sprouting a sex that’s the first proper colour of the day. They bound and they look and they follow and we can’t be not seen, none of us can.
    Here’s one and another, finishing off, pulling out, running after.
    ‘Hannimanni, help us!’ is calling my auntie and one of my sisters as we run.
    I save my breath, but it makes no difference. In the middle of my skitter one of them is on me, smacking me down, knocking out my breath. He takes me in his claws and he shafts me; he breaks open the back of me and forces himself right up inside me, all the way up through to my gaping head. It doesn’t take long to bang and pump me full of pain, full of his stink of wild rocks and untapped water, and the breath you get when all you eat is thorn bushes.
    Then he stops and is gone, and all the losers have run on, and I’m dropped like a bit of cake-crust, or a rooty-end that’s chucked aside for fresher food. Except I hurt; I lie on the rock and I hurt; I lie still so as not to hurt worse.
    Kinnick-Tiddit sits nearby and shivers. She makes the rock wet with her sitting. She’s holding someone’s bab, that’s chewed and dying. The fight is moved out from us all around, a ruff of noise at the edges, like the pale fur around a face.
    Kinnick-Tiddit hovers her nostrils over the torn parts of the bab. ‘This one have had the gong; that bachelor have killed it, the rough bugger.’
    I can’t speak yet; I’m not yet returned from the wild. The pain is all up inside and around me like a stinging mud. I sit in it and be surprised, closed-eyed and tremor-ing just like Hannimanni yesterday.
    They’re chasing Him off.
    ‘Byaa!’ they shout in the distance. ‘Go and feast your fat face on slave-garbage!’
    ‘Aye! Donkey-dung! Try that!’
    ‘Mouldy cake-crusts! See how you do!’
    Closer is Broketooth’s voice, queered in such a way that I know she have took it too: ‘Don’t you come to me bleeding and weeping. Don’t you go thinking Our Father behaved any different when he came to us.’
    And around her whimper all the mothers torn of children, all the dotties hollowed out behind.

    Our servants came, but just to look; they had no food. They found the dead bachelor below us. The stupids, they gathered him onto a cloth just as if he were a proper creature; they covered him with powders and flowers and carried him off for veneration – when there were all these babbies, some on the rock and stone like rubbished fruit-skins, some still in the arms of mams and cousins, staining and mystifying them.
    They tidied them away eventually. By then the babbies smelled bad, and had all been laid down by their mams. The first big mams were climbing the watch-rock and the new Hannimanni was letting them come at Him and groom. My pain was pretty much gone by then, and I was clearing in my head about it all.

    The funk of wildness is fading from the new man’s smell; He’s beginning to be right for us, essential, handsome. Little fights are breaking out all the time, mild better-n-you fights; I myself have bested old Drumbreast, who was a touch too big for me before.
    I sit at the edge. The new Hannimanni struts here and there, chasing off any bachelors that still hang around, clawing up a girlfriend