Rubberwerks 2 - Part 12

Sharon flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and pressed her back against the door when the last of the customers was safely on the other side.

"Who knew working would be so much work?" Janice teased from behind the counter.

"You are back to yourself," Sharon replied, peeling herself off the wall. She arranged the stools around the tables on her way back to the counter where her lover waited. Janice was closing the till on their register. All the credits used by the customers came off a card so the register was connected to the local intranet and deducted with each purchase. The old woman at the bank was overseeing all that so far as Sharon knew.

Janice smiled when she lifted her face to meet Sharon's as the taller woman leaned over the counter for a kiss. It started innocently enough, then turned long and slow.

"This is a conversation we should continue at home."

Janice answered with another gentle, but enigmatic, smile. "Why wait?"

"You want to screw in the shop?"

"I want to show you something first. It's downstairs."

Sharon's face bent to a curious expression, but she followed. It was nice to get out of the main room of the shop. It was odd how quickly it could begin to feel like home, how their apartment in Seattle now felt so far away. Like something from another life.

It was cool in the basement. Janice held the door open for her, allowing her to descend the steps first. The room downstairs was cooler and filled with the rich smell of coffee beans and... something else. Coupled with that foreign scent, a thing Sharon couldn't quite place, was a mechanical hum that seemed to resonate in her chest.

"What are they keeping down here?" she asked.

"A little farther," Janice urged her, a hand reached up to touch Sharon's shoulder. Sharon did not notice that the hand there was a featureless, smooth black color, the light reflecting off it. "Around the corner."

The smile on Sharon's face faltered as the room bent and turned again, revealing the strange object set against the far wall. It was some sort of enclosure, a tube leaned against the wall, and it was clearly leaking, some kind of black ooze weeping from the seams in the enclosure.

"What is that thing?" Sharon asked, turning back to Janice.

It was not Janice awaiting her. The figure behind her had Janice's shape, but it was nude, its features erased by smooth and glossy black material covering it from head to toe. A mouth opened, and Sharon saw a black tongue working inside that mouth as it spoke.

"It is paradise, my love. It will give us a gift that we have always wanted. We will be together. Forever."

"Janice, what's happened to you?"

"There is no Janice. Not anymore. This one is so much more."

Sharon was going to run, had ever intention of pushing past this featureless black doll that replaced her lover, but something was holding her. She looked at her wrist and saw that black tendril was wrapped around it, another on her other wrist, pulled taut. Another snaked around her neck, the rounded end of the tentacle flicking against her chin and lips. The touch of the thing was cool, but it left a warm, tingling sensation wherever it met her flesh.