"The Bully Boys" by Seuzz

He's waiting for me, I thought as I slunk through the school corridors. There was no fucking way I could have dodged him all day, not if he'd wanted to find me. And I knew he'd want to find me, because I knew the bastard, and I knew the way he thought. He was just looking for the chance to catch me and humiliate me: that, I knew. And if I hadn't seen him yet, it could only be because he was lurking somewhere, the asshole, probably smacking his lips in anticipation. I bet he can taste my fear on his tongue.

I felt a sharp elbow in my ribs, and I jumped, but it was just a random someone in the crowd, jostling along like me, eager to escape the school. Still, it made me suck in my breath. My heart was already racing, and my skin felt clammy, and I felt self-conscious at the way my eyes darted desperately about. Not that it mattered. No way I could have spotted the bastard in the crowd, even if my slightly panicked brain could have registered faces. As it was, I could only make out bits and flashes of what was a multi-bodied, multi-throated beast: hair and teeth and cheeks and the upturned collars of varsity jackets and the pastel prints of blouses and scarves. A shrill, chattering hum hung in the air, like a sonic froth boiling up out of the adolescent soup.

Classes had let out at three o'clock, and I had until three-thirty to dodge the asshole. I looked at my watch. Three-oh-nine. I grimaced. I'd wasted as much time as I'd dared in Mr. Cornelius's classroom after the bell rang. If I was lucky, the bastard would have looked for me at my locker first, and then gone hunting for me in Cornelius's. So when I'd left I'd taken the back way, around B-wing instead of through it, so I wouldn't run into him, hoping I could hit my locker while he was looking for me in the civics wing. After that, I could probably lose a few more minutes in the hallways before they began to thin dangerously. And then? Maybe I could hide out in the orchestra room. It would be an obvious hiding place, but the asshole wouldn't have an excuse to swing by there.

"Timothy!"

I flinched, then wilted in relief. It was only Coach Bennigan, gesturing me into the biology lab as I passed. "Found your test," he said as I ducked in after him, grateful for the chance at another temporary hiding place. The coach picked up a stack of white paper, licked a meaty fingertip, and flipped through it. "Pretty good, though not up to your usual standards." He gave me a fatherly wink as he handed it over. Ninety-five percent.

I pretended to study it for a bit, started to ask a question, pretended to think better of it, and went back to chewing my lip thoughtfully. Bennigan watched me with evident amusement. "Think I pulled a boner on the grading?" he said.

"No sir," I replied. "Just double checking." I stuffed it into my backpack. "So, are some of these questions going to be on the final?"

"What do you think?"

"You have my brother's test?" I asked.

"Gave it to him yesterday. What's with you guys? Think you can just keep switching off days and sharing notes?"

"Something like that, sir. It's complicated."

"Well, don't get too fancy. You're slacking off, both of you." He winked again. Bennigan was the school's wrestling coach, but he was also a good—and dedicated—science teacher.

I smiled thinly and turned back toward the door. Three-seventeen, the classroom clock said. The hallways would be pretty empty by now. I'd have to hurry at my locker.

Sure enough, most of the students had already split. F-wing lockers were mostly taken by freshmen who'd have to get to their school bus, so there were only a few stragglers in the hall as I hurried up to the locker that I shared with Travis, my twin brother. I spun the lock, the one whose combination was our shared birthday, and tugged at it. It stuck.

I swore and tried again, going more slowly. Again the lock wouldn't spring. I punched the locker door. Then, as I spun and spun and spun the dial, to completely clear it, I suddenly stopped and stared at it. I touched it.

It was a new lock.

The bastard had changed locks on me!

"Somethin' the matter, Wimpole?"

With a hard blow from behind he caught my neck in the crook of his arm and pulled my face close to his—so close I could smell the cinnamon on his breath. He favored cinnamon gum, as an affectation, the way he favored a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, and he pulled my head down at such an angle that that was all I could see: that damn toothpick and the upper lip twisted up over white, white teeth.

Only ten minutes to go, and he'd caught me. Yes, he must have been lurking. Probably he'd been planning this denouement all day.

I said nothing, and he just kept breathing lightly in my face. I heard snickers from behind me, and knew that he had his crew with him. I felt the fingers of his hand skitter down my chest to my shirt pocket; he pulled out my two pencils and my pen, one by one, and let them clatter to the floor. "You'll wanna pick those up," he said, but instead of letting go he just gripped my neck even more tightly in the crook of his arm.

David Kirkwell was not a big guy; in fact, he was shorter than me and shorter than most of the other juniors at the school; and he didn't even go out for sports. But he was fast and had strong, rounded muscles, and he knew exactly where to punch someone so that it would hurt, and he was strong enough to make those punches really hurt. He could also take almost any punch without flinching, without even slowing down, really. So everyone, even the seniors on the football team, tended to pay him a lot of respect and stay on his good side. Not that he had a good side. Generally David Kirkwell had only two ways of treating people: calling them foul names and luring them into a good beating, or just giving them a good beating without any excuse. I didn't even have the merit of being one of his special projects.

Until recently, that is. Which is why I'd been desperately trying to avoid him all day.

Kirkwell sucked on his toothpick and smirked at me, and lightly tweaked my left nipple between his thumb and forefinger. He had his other hand, the one not draped around my neck, on his hip, and he pulled me back and around so he could lean his shoulder casually against the lockers. I made the mistake of looking up into his face. He had his shades on, but I could still make out the dark eyes behind them: the dark eyes that would be gleaming maliciously at me. His grin widened. "You wanna good fucking, Wimpole?" he asked in a soft voice that was just a little ragged from the cigarettes he liked to smoke between classes. "That how come you're scoping me out?"

"You changed my combination lock," I replied. I didn't want to say anything to him, actually, but I didn't want him filling the silences either, and I figured that little accusation would throw him.

I figured wrong. He dropped his arm and gave me a sharp shove to the chest, so sharp I bounced off the lockers. "I wouldn't touch your gay-ass locker if you hired a hooker and got her to ask me with her warm, dripping pussy." His lip was curled in a really ugly way by now. "Pick your shit up off the ground, Wimpole, or I'll make you pick it up." He flexed his right hand menacingly, and behind him I saw Thomason and Evans and Mendoza grinning at each other.

Damn it, I swore to myself, and followed it up with a lot more choice words. Because I was actually getting aroused.

It was only to hide my swelling boner that I acceded, bending over to quickly snatch up my pencils. But as soon as I'd ducked Kirkwell clapped his hands on either side of my head and pulled it toward his crotch. "Kiss it, Wimpole," he ordered. "Kiss it, and I won't make you suck it."

"Bite me," I snarled back. Still, I could only stare at the front of his jeans, and I felt my cheeks flaming.

A chorus of chortles and guffaws broke out from his crew, and I heard one of them start to clap. "So you do want a good fucking," Kirkwell gloated. He grasped the front of my shirt and hauled me up. "I know just the place to take your virginity. Take it good and hard, too." He swung around behind me, gripping the back of my belt with one hand and with the other pushing me along with a forceful palm between my shoulder blades. In this manner he frog-marched me off toward the custodian's closet.

I didn't struggle much. The hallway clock read three twenty-three as we passed, and I figured he couldn't do much to me in seven minutes.

He made me open the door and then pushed me in and closed it behind me, leaving me alone with the stench of cleaning solutions and ... something else. I fumbled about until I found the light switch. Under the ghastly yellow light I saw that that something else was a moldy old gym mat. I couldn't figure what it was doing here until the obvious answer occurred to me. Some enterprising students had dragged it in to make their illicit, on-campus coupling more comfortable. You can get away with that when your school custodian is just out of college, and willing to trade copies of the closet key (and privacy) for blow jobs.

I could hear voices through the door. Undoubtedly Kirkwell was inventing excuses for sending the others away, which I took to be a good sign. But when the door opened again and he stepped in, his face wasn't any friendlier. If anything, he looked even more sadistically gleeful. "Take your pants off," he ordered.

This surprised me. "You're not fucking serious," I stammered.

He pulled his shirt up and over his head and tossed it away; his torso was smooth and hairless and well-defined. "You wanna make this hard or you wanna make it easy?"

"Jesus, you're really into this." Slowly I began to untie my shoes. I would have to take them off sooner or later, and normally would have been eager to get them off sooner. But these circumstances, as they played out, were unnerving me.

I had barely gotten them and my socks off when Kirkwell grabbed me and shoved my face into one of his bare armpits. "You like the smell, cocksucker?" I mumbled something in reply—the game was proving a lot less fun without an audience—and he began kneading the back of my neck. "Yeah, you like my stink, don't you? You want it all over you."

Yes, I admitted to myself. I do want it all over me.

Then he shoved me away. "How come you still got those pants on?" He pulled his own belt off with a quick snap and ripped the front of his jeans open. He burrowed down into the front of his boxers and pulled out his cock. It was small and very limp.

"Christ, all that foreplay and you still haven't got it up?"

"You're gonna suck on it until it's hard and raging," he taunted back, and his chin tilted up. "And then I'm gonna fuck you up the ass until I cum. And then you're gonna suck your own greasy shit off it until I cum again."

I rolled my eyes, but then I caught the dangerous light in his eyes, and I actually quailed inside. He stepped up close—head tilted back a little, because he was shorter than me—and slowly reached up and grabbed my hair at the top of my head and pulled it back. "Shit!" I squealed, and sank to my knees.

"You think I'm fucking with you?" he said softly. "I can make you do whatever I want. Because you're a pussy and you know it."

Hot tears were in my eyes, and the top of my scalp felt like it was on fire, but I said nothing. How long did I have to delay? Two minutes? Three?

And then the tinny electronic alarm on Kirkwell's watch went off. "Saved by the bell," he said, and let go of my hair.

* * * * *

"Fuck, that was intense," I said as I tore the rest of my clothes off. Kirkwell already had his back on.

"You liked that?" he grinned. He reached back behind some boxes and took out the leather case. "You're gonna have a hell of a time living it down."

"What did you tell the guys, to get rid of 'em?"

"Nothin'." He had the case open and picked out a syringe and a vial. "I figured I'd leave it to you to tell them what happened, or was gonna happen." He plunged the needle into the bottle and carefully drew out the prescribed dosage.

"Set it down over there," I said when he offered it to me; I was still getting my underwear off. "Well, at least you were having fun. Did you have to keep it going to the last moment? I'm glad your—I mean, his—watch was a few minutes fast."

"Is it?" Kirkwell didn't even glance at the watch; he was filling another syringe from another vial. "I was actually trying to time it so I'd get you on your knees or something at the last possible moment. I think I nailed it pretty close."

"Close enough," I said as I picked up my syringe. "That was a performance that's gonna be hard to top. Skoal!"

I raised the needle in a toast and then carefully I slid it into my forearm. It hurt like hell, but it was a pleasant hurt because of what I knew was to come. Kirkwell was doing the same with his syringe. When we were done we quickly packed the equipment away.

It took only a few seconds for the changes to start. Kirkwell's shot hit first. He bent double, then dropped to his hands and knees. His back arched and his chest heaved in an inhuman way, like something was trying to burst out. And then the stuff began to pour out of his mouth. It was red, like arterial blood, and full of ropy tendrils and tubes. It lashed and throbbed as it hit the floor, and flopped away as still more poured out of him. He made snuffling, gagging noises as it slid wetly out of gullet; even when he paused to take deep breaths it kept gushing out. Eventually he began to weaken, and as the last of it slipped to the floor his joints buckled and he toppled over, unconscious, onto the floor.

The bubbling mess, meanwhile, had begun to pull together, becoming darker and more opaque, and then sheathing itself in a livid membrane. First one appendage, like an arm, shot out of it, and then another, and then it split halfway up the middle. It jiggled and then solidified, and a sudden shadow passed over it. And when it sat up it turned a friendly, familiar and mischievous face toward me: my own identical twin brother, Travis.

"Jesus, you look like shit," he said. I glanced down at my arms; yes, they were mottled and red, and growing transparent. I could guess what my face and head looked like: like his had looked just a few moments before.

"Tip him over," I said, nodding my head at Kirkwell, and Travis obliged by rolling our victim over onto his back. Kirkwell groaned and his eyes fluttered open. He stared up as I sauntered over and gazed down at him, then focused on me. Fear ... terror ... pants-shitting horror flared up in them, and weakly he tried to wave me away.

"Please ... Don't," he gasped. I barked a laugh and started to reply, but then the serum hit full force, and I buckled and collapsed to the ground. My vision faded, so that I couldn't even see my final transformation into a semi-gelatinous mess similar to what Travis had just transformed from. I felt as a vibration, rather than heard as a sound, Travis's mocking reply.

"We're not gonna hurt you, Kirkwell. We're just gonna fuck around with your body."

And then I was over his face and inside his mouth and forcing myself down his throat.