Page 35 of Lagoon

“Oh, my God,” she sobbed, pressing her knees together, panting in terror.

He looked down at his genitals. “You… you’ve changed to accept… eggs.”

“You don’t mean…” She looked at his genitals too. “You don’t think…”

“Well, I’d have to expel some, I suppose,” he said. “But maybe we’ve switched in a way, sort of. Maybe if I’m expelling eggs, your ovaries have turned to testes, and then you could fertilize them in your new… uterus.”

“If I have testes, that would make me a man.”

“Right, I don’t… know,” he said. “I was just throwing something out, I guess?”

“We don’t even know that’s an ovipositor,” she said, gesturing at his crotch.

“No,” he said. “We do not.”

It was quiet.

“Could you… expel…?”

“I don’t know.”

“How?”

He met her gaze. “Well… it seems to have… grown in response to sexual stimuli, so maybe it’s… just like, you know… if I masturbate?”

“All right, well, I don’t want to watch that.”

“I don’t want you to watch that,” he said. He was actually deflating again, and the ovipositor, or stinger, or whatever it was, was shrinking. He tucked himself away as it did, zipping himself up. “Maybe… later…”

She yanked on her underwear. “You should draw my blood. See if it’s similar to what’s happening to your blood?”

“Definitely,” he said. “Let’s move on from this.”

“Good idea,” she said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RILEY WASN’T SUREwhat they should say that evening during dinner. She didn’t think the guards would take well to the idea that they were laying eggs. But—at the same time—she didn’t know if trying to hide it would be wise.

For all she knew, the guards were all jerking off before bed, and she couldn’t imagine how they’d react to the idea that their genitals were altered if they saw it with no warning.

Furthermore, however, explaining how she and Jonathan had discovered this about themselves was… no, she couldn’t. And anyway, they couldn’t be sure it was affecting everyone the same way.

So, they stuck to the following:

The male cells were dividing and mutating at an unnatural rate. Jonathan had an injection that could slow it and it seemed to be working on him with no ill effects. Any of the other men who wanted it could have it.

The female cells were not dividing, but they did seem to have been altered. However, the change seemed complete. Something may have happened to the female reproductive system. Whether this was the result of Bub’s needlelike fingers or a combination of whatever Bub had done and the exposure to the soup from the lab in the water supply, no one could say.

The idea of reproductive systems being messed with had everyone nervous.

But none of the male guards wanted the injection that Jonathan had made except Luther. And Riley couldn’t fault them for that. After all, it was experimental, and they couldn’t know what it would do to them.

After the evening meal, she went back to her room and took several shots of liquor, because there was a well-stocked amount of liquor in each of the cabins, something gratis from Anderson Scott, she supposed.

And then, she lay in bed, hoping she’d fall asleep, because she didn’t want to think about what was happening to her.

She felt helpless.

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