My Field Work (Part 7)

The Americans turned up a week later, in an unmarked black helicopter that descended noisily onto the main plaza of the campus one bright, sunny morning. Gail, Alison, Sophie and myself were waiting for them. “Full marks for inconspicuousness, guys,” Gail whispered to me, as the door opened and two people stepped out.

One was a tall man with the shoulders of a corn-fed American footballer, the other was a pretty, fashionably skinny young woman with a mop of bright red hair. They were both wearing identical black suits and black sunglasses.

“That must be Padraigin”, observed Alison. We were all intrigued that, of the two American pharmaceutical reps who had arrived to take over the project, one had the highly unfashionable Irish name of Padraigin, the seldom-encountered female version of the Irish for Patrick. The English equivalent would have been something like Patty. We felt slightly reassured that at least one of our new bosses had some Irish blood in her. Alison stepped forward and put on a brave smile.

“You must be Roy,” she said to the man. He turned his face in her direction, frowned slightly, ignored her outstretched hand, and looked beyond her to the surrounding buildings. I smiled at the young woman, who appeared to be looking at us, although her shades were so opaque it was hard to tell.

“Padraigin, is it?” I said in a friendly voice. She seemed to focus on us.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Um – is your name Padraigin?” I asked. Her blank face tightened, and her sunglasses reflected us back at ourselves.

“It’s pronounced Pa-dray-gin”, she said.

I was silent for a moment. Gail smiled at her.

“Oh,” she said, “right. Um, in Ireland we pronounce it Paw-rig-een.”

“Why,” said Padraigin. It wasn’t that she actually wanted to know about Irish pronunciation; she just wanted to know why we did something so patently stupid.

“…Well,” said Gail, “it’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Padraigin. “My parents liked the name. It’s like Caitlin. That’s my sister’s name.” She pronounced it Kate-Lynn.

“Ah,” Gail went on, “yeah, now, in this country, Caitlin is pronounced Catleen. At least, in the Irish language it is, and it’s an Irish name, so…” She trailed off under Padraigin’s withering stare.

“That’s completely ridiculous,” said Padraigin. “It’s obviously not pronounced like that. Look at the way it’s spelled. God, you people are so backward.” She paused, gave us a look of I-can’t-believe-this-shit-you’re-telling-me, then shook her head incredulously and walked away, towards the Biology building.

That pretty much set the tone for the Americans’ relationship with us. Padraigin and Roy worked for a pharmaceutical giant called Octopus, which was a subsidiary of MediaCorp, the notorious multinational that also owned one or two film studios, most of the major British newspapers, a global television network and, it was rumoured, an aircraft carrier. Octopus had been funnelling money into the Biology Department for years, and had been taking a special interest in the trees – apart from the sheer curiosity value, I couldn’t imagine why, as there was no money to be made out of a sexually voracious tree. They had clearly come to the conclusion that we were fucking the whole thing up, and that they had to take control.

They walked around the Department, inspecting our facilities, and making little sighs and snorts of disbelief and contempt at our relatively primitive equipment. They peered through the glass walls of the greenhouse and had a brief look at the tree, but they didn’t venture inside. They clearly thought that we were a bunch of ignorant hicks.

Padraigin had a Masters in Biochemistry from Harvard. We knew this because the minute she entered Alison’s office, she took it out of her briefcase, hung it on the wall and announced that this was now her office, and that Alison would have to share office space with somebody else. Alison swallowed her pride, but I could see that Gail was having difficulty keeping her temper. Roy stood by the desk, and Padraigin sat behind it. She finally took off her sunglasses, revealing a pair of large, cool, green eyes.

“The conduct of this investigation has been totally amateurish,” she informed us. “Frankly, I’m surprised we weren’t called in sooner. You people seem to be totally incapable of maximizing data output from the standpoint of resource utilization.”

“What?” I said.

“We’ve given you all this money and you’ve come up with jack shit,” she translated, fixing me with a withering stare. She squared her slender shoulders inside her black suit jacket. “From now on, I will be structuring the primary systematics of information management, with a view to capitalizing market-based application procedures.”

I was about to ask her what she meant when Alison translated for us: “You mean, you’re going to take over and get us to find out a way of making money out of this thing.” Alison was pale, and her lips were tight and drawn. Padraigin smiled coldly, as if she were faintly pleased that at least one other person here spoke the same language.

“Exactly,” she said. “There’s no point in funneling resources into the unit if there’s no commercial initiative behind the research. Naturally, I won’t be physically engaging with the subject myself, that’s your job, because after all”, and here her smile took on a faintly malicious edge,” “you have so much more hands-on experience than I do. I will simply direct lab work, which will also be Roy’s special responsibility, and I will also be supervising the overall direction of the research.”

My heart sank. We were basically going to be guinea pigs for Padraigin to watch and make notes about. Great. And yet, I couldn’t help wondering what sort of sex, if any, she herself had. She was so slim, polished and immaculate that it was hard to imagine her being overcome with passion. The only signs of carnality about her, the only evidence that she had blood in her veins and not correcting fluid, were her bright red hair and the healthy pink glow in her cheeks. I noticed, also, that the flash of cleavage between the lapels of her suit jacket looked warm and inviting. She must have caught me glancing at it, because she squared her shoulders and lifted the front of her jacket, to conceal it.

She dismissed us, and we trooped out of the room, depressed. Gail was fuming, and going on about how she had no right to come in here and take it all away from us, but as Alison wearily observed, “She has every right. They’re paying for it. Nothing to do but bow down and get on with it.”

Over the next six weeks, my worst fears about Padraigin’s work methods were confirmed. Gail, Sophie and myself spent most of our time trying to extract sap, core and bark samples from the tree, a process which nine times out of ten ended in our biohazard suits being ripped off our bodies and the thick vines coiling around us, fucking our every orifice and drenching us in explosions of sticky white fluid. It was exhausting and draining to be fucked so regularly, day in and day out, and it didn’t help our sex lives either – Gail and I were almost always too tired to make love to each other, and the same went for Sophie. Alison had helped us for the first week or so, but she soon came down with a mystery illness that kept her off work. So poor Sophie had to worry about her lover, on top of everything else.

Padraigin watched all this from behind two panes of thick glass, with the ever-present Roy recording it all on digital cameras (I wondered if they went back to their hotel room and watched us as a prelude to whatever sort of sex they got up to by themselves). She never appeared to betray any arousal or emotion at what happened to us; we would stagger out of the greenhouse, naked, shaking and covered in fluid, and hand her the sample bottle, and she would snatch it without a word of thanks and scuttle into the lab. We never knew what the hell she was doing in there, and she wouldn’t tell us. Whenever we went for our much-needed drink after work, they never came along. I think they would have forbidden us meal breaks, if they had thought they could get away with it.

Only once did I ever see Padraigin show a flicker of human interest. Gail and Sophie and I had gone into the greenhouse one afternoon, with the express purpose of collecting as much sap as we could. Padraigin had ordered us to go in without our biohazard suits, dressed only in swimming costumes – “Because,” she said, “I’m curious to see whether it responds to human pheromones.” We could have told her that it did, that we already knew that, that we’d learned it the hard way – but we were working for her now, and there was nothing for it but to do what she said.

I was wearing a new pair of red Speedos, Gail was in a one-piece black swimsuit and Sophie wore a pale blue bikini. We all had a plastic litre bottle in each hand, to gather the sap in. We approached the tree in some trepidation. Padraigin was watching intently from behind the glass, about thirty feet away.

“Do it,” muttered Gail to the tree, “just do it and let’s get this over with.” Sophie smiled, and opened her mouth to say something, when the tree suddenly decided to take Gail at her word. It grabbed her from behind and she shrieked, trying to struggle as the vines curled around her legs, arms and shoulders. She cursed and writhed, but they slithered inside her swimsuit and bunched, ripping the fabric. Gail looked at us, knowing exactly what was about to happen to her, and I cried “No!” but too late – the swimsuit stretched and ripped and fell away from my girlfriend’s body, and then Gail grimaced, closed her eyes and went “AaaUNNH!” as the vines slid between her plump thighs and penetrated her.

I looked at Padraigin, who was staring intently and making notes as Gail whimpered, naked in the grip of the tree. I looked back at Gail, and Sophie desperately lunged at the vines, trying to free her friend – but then, the tough vines looped around her ankles and snaked up her thighs. Sophie tried to pull them off, but they swarmed all over her and she disappeared under a thick tangle of them. I’d had enough. I stepped forward, and let the vines grab me, spiraling up into my trunks and ripping them off me; and I sighed as the vines curled around my cock and balls and parted my naked ass cheeks, pressing at my anus. I had no intention of fighting it anymore. I felt the sweet ache rising inside me, my cock grew stiff, and I just bit my lip and whimpered from the bittersweet pain and pleasure as the vine pushed up into my ass.

Gail was panting, her mouth open, her eyes shut, and Sophie had disappeared under the thick coils of vines that covered her. Then, a heavy, fleshy, globular pseudopodium descended on a limblike “branch”, as thick around as my thigh; it parted at the bottom, revealing a moist, pink aperture, then descended over Gail’s head down to the neck. There was a muffled moan from inside, and Gail clutched at her bare flesh.

The tree pulled Gail down onto her back and parted her legs. Then, Sophie, inside her undulating coil of vines, was lifted up and lowered between Gail’s naked thighs. The vines uncurled from her, exposing her body but holding her in a firm grip. Sophie was on her belly, her face at Gail’s pussy, and she immediately began to lick and kiss at it deliriously. She was still wearing her pale blue bikini.

The tree yanked me over to the women, and pulled me down onto Sophie’s back, freeing my arms a little. I desperately needed to fuck. I wasted no time in untying Sophie’s bikini top and flinging it aside, then I dragged her bikini bottom down over her plump black hips and down her legs. She moaned into Gail’s crotch as I guided my cock down between the tops of her thighs. I meant to just fuck her from behind, I wanted to feel Sophie’s sweet vulva enclosing me, but the tree kept pulling me up so that I mounted her rounded ass cheeks, and I was at the wrong angle. The fucking of my own ass was making me burn more and more with the need to cum, and when I finally managed to locate an entrance, and pushed the tip of my cock into it, the tightness and the stifled groan followed by the exclamation of “Ohhhh Jesus!” told me that I was in Sophie’s ass. The part of my brain that wasn’t overcome with the need to fuck cursed the tree, for making me do this to my friend.

But it was too late to stop now, as the vines were swarming over my upper body and over my head, wrapping around my eyes and pushing into my mouth; I sucked on them and jerked my hips violently into the crack of Sophie’s ass. The tightness and friction of it made me cum in only a few seconds, and I felt her shudder and moan. Her ass squeezed my cock, as she tried to force me out of her, but it merely milked more cum from me, and I drove myself into her a last three or four times.

The vines pulled out of my mouth, and fell limply from around my head. I panted for breath and looked down at Sophie’s nude body beneath me, her long smooth back glistening with sweat and heaving, the dark mounds of her ass still split by the shaft of my cock, her face still buried in Gail’s pussy as she nuzzled my girlfriend. Her head still inside the pod, Gail was making wordless noises of ecstasy.

I turned my face away. Behind the glass, Padraigin was rooted to the spot, and had stopped making notes. She was standing, watching us, with a strange expression; I couldn’t work out whether it was fascination, repulsion or something like…envy?

I only saw her for a moment, because just then Gail gave a muffled, liquid cry and arched her back, as she came; then, the pod that had closed over her head opened a little, and a warm, sticky flood of white fluid gushed out of her and spilled all over her naked torso, flowing down over her breasts and belly, down between her thighs and surging over the top of Sophie’s head. Sophie snorted and coughed, and as I reached down to pull her up, the pod unfolded itself from Gail’s head and directed a thick jet of the white sap over my face and chest for good measure. I gasped and spluttered, and the three of us sprawled in the pool of sap as the tree untangled itself from us, pulled its tentacles from the various parts of our bodies it had invaded, and coyly withdrew to its usual dormant state. We lay on the earth of the greenhouse, our naked bodies covered in white fluid, looking like nothing so much as a minor orgy in a paint factory.

Gail coughed, and spat out some sap. We wiped the goo out of our eyes and blinked at each other. I eased my softening cock out of Sophie’s anus, and she sighed slightly, tensing, as I did so. “Sorry about that, Soph,” I whispered, “it wasn’t the hole I was aiming for.” She rolled onto her back, looked up at me, gave me a painful half-smile and then squeezed my shoulder affectionately. Then we rolled off each other, and with aching bodies, we started scooping up as much of the sap as we could get into our specimen bottles. When I looked up at Padraigin, she was wearing her usual impatient expression. Just another day for her.

Winter turned to spring, and Gail, Sophie and I had become resigned to our status as low-status drones when at the end of a particularly long and hard day, Padraigin called us into her office.

“I have good news,” she said, and for the first time, she was smiling in a way that suggested she was actually happy. “There have been major breakthroughs, and the head of our European division is coming over to hear a presentation.”

“What major breakthroughs?” asked Gail, brushing a wet strand of hair out of her face. She had just come from the showers, after an unusually prolonged and intense fucking by the tree that had left her weak and shaky. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them, and she wasn’t even bothering to conceal her adamant dislike of Padraigin.

“I’ve been working on a compound derived from the tree’s sap,” Padraigin rattled on. “I may as well tell you about the way the research has been going. Octopus is interested in seeing if the tree has any properties that could be of use in a drug for prolonging sexual arousal in women.”

“A female Viagra,” said Gail stonily. “That’s what you’ve been working on?”

“Oh, but much more potent,” said Padraigin, her green eyes flashing. “Of course, there were things we had to iron out. But I’m glad to say that I think we’ve come up with something that has major commercial potential.”

“I’m very happy for you,” said Gail. “I suppose you want us to test it?”

“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said Padraigin. “I’ve tested it on myself. It works fine. No side-effects whatsoever.”

I glanced at Roy, and had to restrain a laugh – the look of tight-lipped sullenness on his face told me that he had not been a part of the testing process.

“How serious have the tests been?” asked Sophie. “You can’t go presenting this thing without proper clinical trials.”

“Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!” snapped Padraigin. “It’s an arousal drug, for Christ’s sake, not a cancer cure. The thing is fine. The only problem is, I can’t think of a name for it. I thought maybe something Irish-sounding, seeing as the drug was developed here.”

“How about Poguemahone?” suggested Gail, and this time I snorted so loud that my spit flew across the room and hit the window. Poguemahone, from the Irish póg mo thóin, means “kiss my arse”. Padraigin looked delighted.

“That’s great!” she said. “So anyway, I need you here tomorrow at nine for the presentation. Your Minister of something is gonna be here as well, I forget what exactly…”

“Arts and Sciences,” murmured Roy.

“That’s right,” said Padraigin. “Nine sharp. And dress up for once in your lives, all right? You can go now.” She’d lost her earlier good humour, and seemed a bit disappointed that we hadn’t showered her with congratulations on her new wonder drug.

Later that night in the pub, round about the third pint, Gail returned once again to the main point. “She’s fucking nuts! She hasn’t run any sort of serious trials on this thing. And she’s doing a presentation on it, in front of the Minister? What’s she plan to do, have us go down there and put on a show?”

“I think the Minister should meet the tree,” I grinned. The Minister for Arts and Sciences was a tall, attractive blond woman in her fifties. The papers were always running stories about the “most glamorous woman in government”, neglecting to mention that her policy of ruthless cuts had caused many arts centers to close down. I thought it would be fun to see this smooth, immaculately turned-out woman naked and writhing while the tree fucked her in orifices she hadn’t known she had. Gail just scowled and took a drink from her pint.

“Bloody Padraigin. She probably would set the tree on us, if she thought she’d get more subsidies. God, I’m knackered. I’ve got bruises on my thighs like you wouldn’t believe. I’m getting really fucked off, being her paid worker bee while she takes the credit.”

“Maybe she’ll go back to America and let us get on with it,” said Sophie, sipping her glass of wine.

“Here’s hoping,” said Gail, raising her pint glass. We all toasted Padraigin’s departure.

In fact, she did stop being in charge of the project, but not quite in the way we anticipated.

We all went to work next day joined by Alison, who was feeling much better, and who had put on a little weight from her weeks in bed. The four of us were dressed in our best suits, and we found Padraigin rushing around in the conference room, yelling at the hapless undergraduates who were trying to work out how to operate PowerPoint, calling them incompetent morons, and rejecting the college tap water for being too “flat” and ordering somebody to go out and get a dozen bottles of Evian. Roy was sitting at the table, making notes. Everybody was waiting for the Head of the European Division and the Minister, who were having a power breakfast in the government buildings.

We all went to work next day joined by Alison, who was feeling much better, and who had put on a little weight from her weeks in bed. The four of us were dressed in our best suits, and we found Padraigin rushing around in the conference room, yelling at the hapless undergraduates who were trying to work out how to operate PowerPoint, calling them incompetent morons, and rejecting the college tap water for being too “flat” and ordering somebody to go out and get a dozen bottles of Evian. Roy was sitting at the table, making notes. Everybody was waiting for the Head of the European Division and the Minister, who were having a power breakfast in the government buildings.

Finally, Padraigin’s phone rang; it was the college porter telling us that the party had arrived. They mooched into the room in that annoyingly unhurried way that very powerful people have, knowing perfectly well that we exist to wait on them, not the other way round. The Head of the European Division was a smooth, compact, powerful-looking guy in his fifties, looking like a Police captain or a mob boss, with an air of tailored suits and very expensive soap. The Minister, Mrs. McDonald, was tall, rather lovely-looking in a cool and scented sort of way, and a fluent talker, wearing a daringly low-cut top under her pinstripe suit. There was a handful of Octopus executives, a couple of secretarial-looking people and finally two armed Gardaí (Irish: police officers), a handsome, ridiculously young-looking guy and his partner, an even younger-looking, small, rather pretty brunette, the Minister’s bodyguard, who stood together by the door and looked impassive.

The Head of the Division, Mr. Macchio, introduced Mrs. McDonald to Padraigin, who smiled in a poised way and didn’t bother to introduce the rest of us, referring to us as “the workers”. Then we all sat at the table, the lights dimmed, and the presentation began.

Padraigin stood next to the projection screen with a pointer in her hand.

“For some months now,” she began, “the team here have been investigating the properties of certain flora that were originally discovered in the central plain.” A picture came up of the swamp-tree that had fucked Gail and I so many months ago. “These trees,” she went on, “have a unique manner of interacting with humans, the precise details of which need not be gone into here, but which, suffice to say, have encouraged the development of a product that we believe can, if put into production, bring significant benefits to this country’s economy. The fact that the only source of raw materials for the product are in this country, further encourages our hopes for the future.”

She paused, coughed slightly, and went on. The picture of the tree was replaced by an animation of a slowly rotating molecule.

“This is the molecule that we have isolated,” said Padraigin, pausing only to cough again somewhat louder, before resuming “that constitutes the principal active ingredient of the agent. Excuse me.” She paused again, flushing slightly, took out a handkerchief, coughed heavily into it, and put it away again. Somebody handed her a drink of water. She took a sip and continued.

“Without being too technical, the agent works by encouraging serotonin production. Serotonin, as I’m sure we all know, is the so-called chemical for happiness. Its release is stimulated by this molecule, which is only present in certain tissues found in these trees and which appears to be impossible to synthesise. We have, however, managed to produce a product using natural plant derivatives, which simulates the arousing and pleasurable effects of the tree without its unfortunate side-effects.”

She stopped and swallowed. She seemed to be perspiring heavily. She picked up the water glass and had a long drink out of it. There was a slightly uncomfortable silence.

“Just out of curiosity,” asked Mrs. McDonald politely, “exactly what are the side-effects of the stuff from this tree? How does it interact with humans?”

“I can answer that,” said Gail, and then yelped and clenched her teeth as Alison kicked her under the table.

“It’s a somatic process that’s somewhat difficult to describe,” said Alison smoothly. Padraigin gave Alison a grateful look. She clearly wasn’t feeling at all well. She indicated to the student to put up the next slide, and the screen was suddenly filled with an array of chemical formulae.

“We believe that this product,” Padraigin began, then swallowed and had another drink of water, “this product…can…”

She gulped and swayed slightly, then stumbled against the edge of the table and groaned.

“Are you all right, Ms Hooper?” asked Mr. Macchio.

“I’m fine, I’m sorry,” grated Padraigin through clenched teeth. “Just a touch of cramp. I’m very sorry, must be something I ate. Just give me a moment, and I’ll…”

Suddenly her green eyes glazed over, she shuddered and moaned. She dropped her clipboard, pulled open her suit jacket, and thrust a slim hand inside the waistband of her skirt, into her crotch. She closed her eyes.

“Ohhhhhh…” Padraigin moaned. “Ohh fuuck...” She was clearly touching herself down there, vigorously, and getting results.

Gail’s hand gripped mine. I glanced at her – her face showed something like glee for the first time in weeks. Mr. Macchio half-rose, his face like thunder, but then Padraigin opened her eyes and stared at him – and her eyes seemed to flash green fire. He fell back into his seat and his mouth hung open. And a strange green glow extended from Padraigin, to fill half the room. I was reminded of a story I’d read about an incident during the Manhattan Project, in which a test of the critical mass went wrong and caused the uranium to glow a lethal, radioactive blue.

The people from MediaCorp, Mrs. McDonald, her entourage and Padraigin herself were up at the other end of the table, inside the fuzzy area of green light, and something seemed to be holding them in their seats. Gail, Sophie, Alison and I were at the narrow end of the table, with the undergraduates, where the light was normal. We stared at each other, and found that we all had total freedom of movement. We were glad, because none of us, not Alison, Sophie, Gail, any of our assistants, or myself, wanted to go near Padraigin right now.

Padraigin was rubbing herself furiously, and staring at Mrs. McDonald, who was apparently transfixed with horror. Then, to our amazement, Padraigin ripped off her jacket, pulled her skirt down over her ankles, tore open her blouse, and hauled frantically at the rest of her underclothing. She tore her bra in two and threw it aside, revealing a pair of lovely pear-shaped breasts – then she pulled down her tights and slid her panties down over her unexpectedly broad hips, stripping herself naked.

She had a beautiful body, not as designer-slim as I’d imagined, but with pleasing curves at the hips and lovely pert breasts. She sank to her knees, baring her white teeth and growling, and a sort of milky film flicked over her green eyes as her right hand worked furiously between her legs. Her other hand was caressing her tight pink ass as she knelt on the floor, emitting weird liquid purring noises, then she seemed to convulse and twitch, as if she were about to throw up – then, to our lasting horror and amazement, she fell onto all fours, and convulsed once more, and a thick coil of ten-foot-long green tentacles sprang out of her mouth and twisted exultantly in the air.

It was as if a plant had suddenly sprouted out of her mouth. The glistening, bulbous tentacles wavered blindly in the air, their roots still deep somewhere inside Padraigin’s slim body – then they leapt forward, and seized the Minister, Mrs. McDonald.

Mrs. McDonald snapped out of her trance and screamed. The young Garda and Ban Garda (policeman and policewoman, respectively) stepped forward, reaching for their guns, but then they stopped, as if hypnotized – and fell on each other, ripping each other’s uniforms off, kissing each other and wrestling urgently. Alison stood up, looked at us, and hesitated. Sophie grabbed her arm. We didn’t want this to happen – but at the same time, we did, we needed whatever sort of truth was unfolding here to unfold. The four of us, and our two student assistants, rose and backed away as far as we could from the green glow.

The tentacles wasted no time in pulling Mrs. McDonald’s clothes off her; first her natty pinstriped suit and shoes were flung into a corner, then her low-cut silky top, and finally her bra and her panties were hauled off her; then they quickly snaked around her thrashing naked form and bulged into her mouth, slithering down into her crotch and lifting up her naked arse to shove a slimy, swollen tip between her buttocks. She was dragged off her chair and fell on her back on the floor, trying to struggle, but straining her bare arms and legs against the tightening grip of the swarming tentacles. Unable to scream because of the vines filling her mouth, she gave a stifled moan and her eyes bulged as they penetrated her vagina; then, as she desperately struggled to move her hips away, they slid inexorably up into her ass, making her shut her eyes tight and squeal “MMMM!” Then her head disappeared as the vines coiled up around it, enveloping her completely.

Meanwhile, the tentacles that weren’t fucking the Minister were still swarming out of Padraigin’s mouth and crawling all over her own body. She was sprawled face down on the conference room floor, the tips of the vines pushing up into her vulva and shoving down between her quivering ass cheeks. The poor girl whimpered as she was overcome by whatever had taken root inside her, even as the tentacles bursting out of her mouth were enveloping and fucking the naked body of the older woman.

We could do nothing but watch. Everyone inside the bubble of green light that had spread to encompass those at the top of the table was either totally still, or overcome with lust. Padraigin was twitching and moaning as she came over and over again from the fleshy green vines in her ass and pussy. The Minister was whimpering and squirming, her naked body almost invisible inside the thick cocoon of vines, as the tentacles invaded her completely. The Garda and Ban Garda had got each other’s clothes off, and their naked, panting wrestling match had been won for the moment by the Garda, who had forced his partner onto her belly on the carpet, mounted her, and was energetically sodomising her while she panted, groaned and reached behind herself to touch him, running her hands over his naked hips and vocally urging him on (in Irish, which we afterwards agreed had been especially impressive).

We stood and watched in silence. None of us wanted to get involved. Eventually Gail grinned and remarked, “My friends always said that only geeks were interested in botany.”

Finally, the tentacles inside the Minister came, and the cocoon of vines that covered her body burst and exploded with white fluid, drenching her; Padraigin herself shuddered, squealed and writhed, rolling onto her back, as the same white fluid spilled up in gouts out of her mouth, pouring over her face; and the Garda groaned as he spent himself noisily in the Ban Garda’s anus, while she moaned loudly and pushed her hips back onto his cock, one hand thrust between her legs. The green light faded. The only sounds were heavy breathing from Padraigin, Mrs. McDonald, and the two hapless Gardaí, still lying on the carpet, sweaty, naked and disheveled.

The tentacles that were still filling Padraigin’s mouth and had covered Mrs. McDonald suddenly withered and dissolved into pale smoke – then they had gone, leaving only a faint small of new-cut grass. The Minister lay on her stomach, naked, her body flushed pink with orgasm, one arm outflung, the other touching her nipple; her ribcage heaving, her whole body covered in white sap, which dripped off her and soaked into the carpet. The male cop, suddenly self-aware, was stricken with embarrassment; he gingerly dismounted from the even more embarrassed female cop, and they withdrew into a corner, clinging to each other and trembling.

Mr. Macchio managed to finally stand up. He stepped over the recumbent body of the Minister and looked down at Padraigin, who was crimson with humiliation, her face and body streaked with the white fluid. She stared fearfully up at him and put one hand over her bare breasts, the other over her red patch of pubic hair, trying to cover herself. For the first time, I actually felt a pang of sympathy for her.

“Ms Hooper,” he rumbled, “consider yourself fired.”

And with that, the rest of the MediaCorp team rose and followed him out of the room. Only Roy remained, sitting at the table with a dazed expression on his face.

The four of us stood up and ran towards the other end of the table. Alison and Sophie looked to the Minister; Gail and I knelt next to Padraigin.

“Do you get it now?” asked Gail quietly.

Padraigin looked up at her, and her eyes were wet with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “I shouldn’t have doubted you guys. You knew what you were doing and I didn’t trust you. I’m such a fucking idiot…”

Gail looked down at her, and I felt a surge of love for her as her face softened and she gathered the sobbing girl into her arms.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, patting Padraigin on the shoulder. “You’re one of us now. None of us know what’s going on. We have to work together. You see how it is?”

“Yes,” Padraigin sniffed into Gail’s bosom. “Fuck the company. Fuck the money. I’m really sorry. I want to work with you guys. Is that okay?”

Gail hugged her, flashed a smile at me, and kissed the poor girl on her forehead. “Of course it is. But we’re in deep shit now. We may have to go underground.”

“I agree,” said a voice. We turned and looked at the Minister, who was sitting up, managing an exhausted smile from behind the mask of clinging white sap that had spilled over her face. Sophie had draped her suit jacket over Mrs. McDonald’s shoulders, which didn’t cover her at all but was at least a gesture towards modesty. Behind her, the two cops were huddling together, naked, looking at us with an expression of awed respect.

“This is the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Mrs. McDonald quietly. “I can either go mad, or I can try to think about it. I’m going to think about it, but we have to keep this top secret. This is not going back to my people, or the government, or anyone else. Is that clear?”

She looked at her staff sternly. They looked too shocked to disobey, and just nodded dumbly.

“Now,” she went on, “that’s not going to be easy with MediaCorp after you. You’ve made yourselves some very bad enemies. I think you people have to get out of here, and go somewhere you can’t be found.”

“We have to get the tree out too,” said Alison. Mrs. McDonald nodded.

“Definitely. You need to go somewhere secret, and somewhere safe. It might be an idea for you to take Donal and Margaret with you, if they want to go.” She looked inquiringly at the two naked Gardaí, who both nodded enthusiastically. “They know what this thing can do,” she went on, “and they trust me implicitly. Plus, they’ve been trained in security. I’ll try to cover for you. Whatever this thing is, it’s too powerful; we have to keep it safe from MediaCorp.”

“Okay,” said Alison, and she seemed to be gaining new strength with the prospect of our new status as outlaws. “We go silent, and we go deep. Are we all ready for this? There’s no going back.”

“I’m ready,” said Gail.

“I’m ready,” I said.

“So am I,” said Sophie, smiling and polishing her glasses.

“So are we,” chorused Donal and Margaret.

“Can I come too?” said Padraigin weakly.

“Of course you can,” said Gail. Alison and I hugged Padraigin, who grinned shamefacedly and started to apologise all over again.

“Wait a second,” said Sophie. We all looked at her. She was scanning the room, and then stopped, staring at something on the ground. She looked troubled. We knew just how troubled she was when she spoke next, because she swore. What she said was:

“What the fuck has happened to Roy?”

To Be Continued…

My Field Work (Part 6)

After her mysterious absorption and expulsion by the tree, Alison’s whole manner changed. It humbled her, and yet made her more confident; she no longer needed to be pompous and dictatorial to get things done, but slowly acquired a natural authority. She smiled and joked more often, and dressed more casually, less stiffly. Her skin glowed with health; and it was Gail’s private conviction that only something as overwhelming as being fucked by the tree could have been mind-blowing enough to turn someone like Alison into a human being. The atmosphere in the department eased, and we all found it easier to move the research on.

In particular, we agreed on what to do with Matthew. We built a special climate-controlled section in a distant corner of the greenhouse, and we simply planted him. Then we waited, and waited to see what would happen.

At first nothing did. Three months went by, and the seed remained dormant. We decided to be patient, and let it get on with itself. We were pretty sure that something would happen in the end.

What happened would, in the end, turn our enclosed little world upside-down.

I hardly like to describe how the whole thing started, because the circumstances are almost too bizarre, regrettable and humiliating to go into, but in the interests of full disclosure I had better attempt it.

It was late one December night, and we were all working on different things. I was running tests on some seedlings in the greenhouse; Gail was in the library, researching; Sophie was in the lab, experimenting with soil acidity, and Alison was catching up on paperwork.

Gail had been staring at abstracts of old reports for hours, and she needed a cup of coffee. The only coffee machine in the department was in the corridor between the lab and Alison’s office, so Gail left the library, walked across the darkened campus and entered the Biology building.

She made her way through the corridors and passed the door of the lab. And then, she heard voices. Two women. One was saying something in a low, urgent tone, and the other sounded like she was trying to protest. Gail edged close to the door, crouched, and peered round it.

The lab was dark and deserted, but the moonlight shone on Alison and Sophie. Alison had her arms around Sophie, and had pushed the girl up against the edge of a large examination table. She seemed to be pawing at Sophie’s clothes. Gail realised with shock that Alison was topless – her jacket, t-shirt and bra were discarded on the floor.

“Come on,” Alison was whispering, as she kissed Sophie all over her neck and jaw, “I can feel you want it! Let’s do it! Now!” Sophie was trying to fight Alison off, moaning “Noo, Alison, we can’t, this is all wrong! This is not right!” Then she gasped as Alison unbuttoned her blouse and unclipped her bra at the front, and started to kiss Sophie’s firm, exposed breasts.

“Oh, God, yes!” Alison gasped. “We have to! Now!” Her hands reached down to her own short black skirt, she quickly unzipped it and let it fall around her ankles – then, she urgently pulled her tights and then her own panties down over her hips, and stepped out of her clothes. Sophie whimpered, and squirmed as Alison kissed her full on the lips, running her hands inside the waist of Sophie’s combat trousers.

Gail ducked back into the corridor. She knew exactly what had happened; the spore had got into Alison, doubtless via her experiences with the tree, and it was now making her sexually voracious, just like Matthew. She was being made to force herself on poor Sophie, and there wasn’t much doubt that what had happened to Matthew would happen to her. Gail realised that she needed to separate them, and that was a job for two people.

Two minutes later, I was cleaning up in a small washroom just off the greenhouse when Gail burst in.

“The spore’s got Alison!” she said urgently. “She’s raping Sophie in the lab! We need to get them separated as quick as possible!” I didn’t need any more persuading, and I ran out after her.

We belted down the corridor to the lab. Gail skidded to a halt next to a fire extinguisher, and took it off the wall.

“A couple of these might do it,” she said breathlessly. “Make sure it’s the foam type. We need to distract them and blind them.” She tossed it at me and I caught it. She ran further on, found another foam-type extinguisher, and then the two of us quickly tiptoed up to the door of the lab. Fierce, breathless panting, accompanied by stifled, pitiful, rhythmic moaning, was coming from inside.

We squinted through the window into the darkened lab.

It was worse than we thought. Sophie was lying on her stomach on the tabletop, naked. Alison, also naked, was on top of her, mounted on the girl’s hips, one hand over Sophie’s face, the other reaching round underneath the other girl’s pubis. Alison’s eyes were closed and her face was glistening with perspiration. Sophie’s hands were flat on the table by her shoulders, and her legs were parted where Alison was between them. Her face was covered by Alison’s hand, but she was clearly in great distress; Alison appeared to be fucking her anally, presumably with some kind of prosthetic – perhaps she had developed one organically? Alison’s experience had been unlike ours: had the tree transformed her into some kind of mutant hermaphrodite? My mind was racing, but there was no time to speculate. We had to act.

Gail looked at me, and we nodded at each other. Then she pulled out the safety pin of her fire extinguisher. I did the same. She reached out until her fingers were just over the light-switch, then she silently counted down three, two, one – and, on zero, she thumped the switch, flooding the lab with light, as we two burst through the doors, pointed the nozzles of the extinguishers at the two naked bodies on the table, and jammed down the discharge buttons.

For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw Alison’s eyes open slightly, and then widen in horror – but then her face, and her entire upper body, vanished under a thick torrent of foam. She raised her hands to try and ward it off, but this just exposed Sophie instead, whose dark, glistening features were likewise obliterated by the cascade of white sludge that erupted over them. Gail and I played our extinguishers up and down Sophie and Alison’s bodies, ignoring their muffled screams of protest, until the streams slowed to a spurt, then a trickle, then a dribble. Then we stopped.

Alison and Sophie were all but buried by a mountain of glutinous white foam. Their limbs waved feebly, and a dark O appeared where Alison opened her mouth to suck in some air – then, from that same mouth, came an angry yell of “What the FUCK are you DOING!!”

“It’s not your fault, Alison,” said Gail soberly. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I saw you starting to attack Sophie a few minutes ago, and I knew it had to be the spore.”

Some inches below the dark O that showed where Alison’s mouth was, another one appeared, and an extremely annoyed voice snarled “She wasn’t attacking me, you – you fucking moron!”

Neither Gail nor I had ever heard Sophie swear so violently before. We looked at each other, baffled.

The upper half of the mountain reared up, as Alison got off Sophie, a ragged snow-woman covered in sticky white foam. Sophie gave a little moan as the business end of a double dildo was eased out from between her tight buttocks. The other end was still inside Alison, who pulled it out of herself with a whimper, biting her lip. Then she wiped some more foam off her face, and glared at us, clearly mortally embarrassed, but also very, very angry.

“It wasn’t the bloody spore at all! Sophie and I are…are…” Alison’s already red face flushed a deeper crimson.

“We should have told you,” muttered Sophie, rolling onto her side and sitting up. “We knew exactly what we were doing. Alison and I are lovers. We got together shortly after we met, when I first came to the college. It’s just that we’re a bit more…experimental now, than we used to be.”

I felt my bowels go cold. What had we done? I looked at Gail, who had turned so white she was almost blue.

“But,” she stammered, “I, I heard you! You kept saying no, no, no, I thought you were being forced…”

“I was afraid we’d get discovered,” said Sophie, wiping foam off her head. “And I was right to be,” she added, glancing at Alison with an ironic smile. Alison just glared at us.

“All right, so now you know,” she said. “Happy?”

“Oh…my…God…” whispered Gail. “I am…SO sorry. I really, I should have thought...”

“That’s why you never wanted to go on a date with any of those guys, isn’t it?” I said. Sophie nodded, and glanced again at Alison, and this time I saw the fond look in her eyes as she surveyed her lover’s furious expression and foam-covered, naked body. I had to stare at the floor, I was so embarrassed.

“You’re as bad as her!” said Alison to me. “You didn’t exactly stop and think, did you? God, some people have absolutely no bloody imagination.”

“We’re really sorry,” mumbled Gail in the direction of her feet. “We’ll make it up to you.” I nodded in agreement.

“I’d like to know how!” Alison snorted.

“Wait,” said Sophie softly. I sneaked a glance at her. She had recovered her usual poise with impressive speed, considering that only a few moments ago she had been naked and covered with foam, with a dildo up her arse, and her lover on top of her. She was looking at Gail and me with quiet amusement. Alison raised one eyebrow quizzically. Sophie leaned over and whispered into her ear, and the frown on Alison’s face turned into an expression of mischievous glee.

“Oh, I like the sound of that,” she said.

“Shall we do it?” said Sophie.

“Yes,” said Alison, and kissed Sophie on the lips. Then she turned to us.

“Right,” she ordered. “Put those two chairs side by side. Then strip down to your underwear, and sit on them.”

Gail and I looked at each other with foreboding as we placed the two cheap plastic seats next to each other, then dutifully undressed – me to my boxers, she to her bra and panties – and sat on them. Sophie fetched some tight cables from a locker, and she and Alison quickly and efficiently tied us to our chairs, and the chairs to each other. When they had finished, we were bound and helpless.

“All right,” said Alison with an evil smile. “We’re just going to get cleaned up a bit, then we have to get some equipment, but we’ll be back. And we will see that you pay for this.”

“Wait!” said Gail, but the two naked, foam-splattered women gathered up their clothes and walked out of the room without looking back.

We sat in silence for some time.

“I’m sorry about this,” Gail said eventually.

“Yeah, well, I think we’re gonna be sorrier before this is over.”

“How was I supposed to know?” she wailed. “Don’t tell me you know that they were having a thing!”

“Hey, don’t shout at me,” I said, trying to calm her. “I totally believed you. It seemed plausible enough at the time. So much weird shit’s been going on that the idea of two people just falling in love seemed so unlikely.”

Gail was silent for a bit, then she said “Why? It happened to us.” I looked at her, and she was smiling at me.

“True,” I admitted. “But who’d’ve thought that Alison and Sophie would go for each other?”

“Yeah. Or that Alison would be such a domme?”

“Or that Sophie’d take it up the ass?”

“You fancy her,” said Gail, grinning.

“I do not!”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, you’re the one who’s stuck your tongue up her bottom.”

“I’d rather stick my tongue up her bottom than up your bottom.”

“Is that any way to talk to your loved one?”

“All right, you two – shut it,” came a voice from the door. We looked up.

Sophie and Alison were still wet from the shower, wearing identical white towelling bathrobes. Alison was pulling a trolley from the canteen, and had a nylon camcorder case slung over one shoulder. Sophie had a fire extinguisher in each hand. They were smiling at us. And at that moment, Gail and I began to see what they had in store for us.

They came up to us. The trolley had two huge saucepans on it, covered with cloths, plus a camera tripod. Alison unfolded the tripod and put it on the ground in front of us, then took out a digital video camera and fixed it to the tripod. She turned it on and peered through the lens, testing it.

“Oh, you’re not going to film us?” said Gail nervously. I tried to nudge her, to let her know that signs of fear, panic or humiliation would only stimulate them, but I was too tightly bound.

“Just for private consumption,” said Alison, smiling remotely. Evidently pleased with the image she had, she stepped away from the camera. Its red light was on; we were being recorded.

Sophie took the pins out of the extinguishers and placed them nearby. Then she stepped up to the trolley. She smiled at us in a friendly way, then took one of the cloths off the saucepans and sniffed the contents.

“Mmmmm,” she smiled. “It’s incredible how much treacle those big catering tins can hold. We used six of them.”

“What are you going to do to us?” said Gail, a tremor in her voice. Alison walked around behind us.

“Just mess you up a little, girl, nothing too horrible,” said Sophie soothingly. Gail yelped, as Alison reached around her with a pair of scissors, and quickly snipped Gail’s bra at the front and the shoulders, whipping the scraps of cloth away. Then she moved behind me and cut my boxers up each side, then pulled them off, stripping me naked. Gail still had her panties on. Sophie picked up the saucepan, straining under its weight, and walked up to me.

“Oh no,” I muttered.

“Oh yes,” she said, beaming. Gail looked from me to her in horror.

Sophie stood in front of me and tilted the saucepan over my head. A thick glob of treacle landed on my head and slid down over my forehead, irresistibly, covering my head. It flowed into my eyes and I could only hear Alison giggle and Gail flinch, as the treacle poured over my face and splattered down in stringy gobs onto my chest, flowing warmly over my belly and pooling in my lap. I knew that Gail was watching her man being ritually humiliated, and the thought made me begin to have a hard-on, which was even more humiliating. I moaned.

“Good lord,” I heard Sophie murmur. “I think he likes it.”

“You’re not going to do that to me, are you?” asked Gail, her voice trembling.

“Oh no,” said Alison. “Well – not yet. For you we have special treatment. After all, you instigated this.”

My head was still coated in thick black molasses. My eyelids were glued shut. I heard the snip of scissors, and then a little shriek as Gail’s panties were evidently cut in two and whisked away from her. Then there was a short pause, during which I heard footsteps and Gail’s rapid, shallow breathing, then she cried “Oh no! No! Please!”

“Calm down,” came Alison’s sensible voice. “It’s only egg, milk, sugar and cornflour, with a bit of colouring.”

“Please don’t,” Gail said desperately. I was turned on by Gail’s impending humiliation, and was trying to imagine it; the helpless, naked young woman, trussed up next to her equally helpless naked lover, who was the more helpless for being blinded with a thick coating of molasses; now she had to face her own reckoning, whatever it was.

“Look up,” said Sophie, “and remember to smile.”

“Oh no!” whimpered Gail, “No, please, don’t, don’t do it, it’s too…”

Then I heard a soft splat, and Gail made a sort of “Mmbl!” noise. There was a cool sliminess on my right shoulder and arm, then I heard a loud liquid spattering that seemed to go on for a very long time.

Then Gail went “Mmaahhh!” and gasped for breath, and moaned “Oh nooooo! Oh God…please don’t do this to me…”

“Why not?” asked Sophie innocently.

“It…it’s so humiliating,” Gail sobbed, “I can’t…oh please...”

“Your man seems to like the thought of it,” said Sophie.

“Perhaps we should give him a look at you,” said Alison.

“NOOO!” cried Gail. “Don’t let him see me like this!” But a damp cloth wiped the treacle from my eyes, and I focused them on Gail, sitting next to me. Her entire head, shoulders, neck, breasts and upper torso were masked in thick, shiny, pale blue custard. They must have used gallons of it. It was heaped up over her eyes and still sliding over her face. Her bare legs and naked thighs and ass were about the only parts of her that it didn’t cover.

“Isn’t she sweet?” purred Sophie. “But I think she needs more topping.”

Alison, behind Gail, lifted the saucepan of treacle and emptied it over my girlfriend. The sticky black sludge poured over her head and flowed down onto her heavy breasts. Gail was making indistinct moaning noises. Alison emptied the entire pan of treacle over Gail, then she walked around in front of us again and stood next to Sophie, an arm around her lover’s shoulders.

“I think we’ve had enough,” I said. Gail whimpered faintly and nodded. Alison smirked and picked up a fire extinguisher. Sophie hefted hers, and I just had time to cry out “NOO!” before they turned them on us.

The spray splattered all over my face, and I heard Gail give a muffled, wet scream as it hit her as well. In seconds I was blinded again, and then I could only loll and make whimpers of protest as the two women annihilated us with the foam. It seemed to last forever. Then, the relentless spatter of foam ceased, and Gail and I sagged naked under the weight of the slime and goo we had been covered with. I could make out the sound of Alison and Sophie laughing. Gail’s body panted for breath next to me. I had never been so ruthlessly and relentlessly humiliated in all my life.

Then the women’s laughing seemed to die away. I flopped in my chair, blinded, half-deaf, still trussed up, waiting to see what would happen next.

Suddenly, I felt desperate fingers untying the cables that bound me, and my lower body was flooded with a familiar, sinister, melting sensation. I slithered off the chair and fell face down in a pool of slime on the floor, but even while I was starting to get up, I felt an athletic, naked woman’s body mounting my hips, and a pliable silicone rod pushing between my slime-covered ass cheeks. A face was burying itself in the slime around my head, and hot breath rasped in my ear.

“Alison! No! God!” I moaned, but in a series of urgent jerks of her hips, she managed to push the tip of the double dildo up against my ass.

“Please!” I screamed. “Don’t! Please, not my ass, I - aaAAUNNHH!” as Alison brutally urged the tip of the dildo into the ring of my anus. I flopped, face-down, into the pool of muck. I thrashed beneath her, and my right hand came into contact with another naked body, writhing and shaking as some other person had clambered astride them and was fucking them. The pressure of Alison’s dildo in me made my cock grow hard once more, and I gasped, trying to fight her off – because I was as certain of my need to be fucked as I was certain that I wanted to be doing this to her.

None of us were in control of ourselves any more. We squirmed together in the deep puddle of thick, oily, sticky sludge on the floor of the lab, trying to find every possible sexual permutation. Alison’s hips shoving into my ass made me ever more desperate to find somewhere for my own cock to go, and I reached out blindly and laid my hands on a pair of bare legs. I hauled myself up them and my hands touched a pair of rounded, protuberant ass cheeks. Without even caring whose they were, I dragged myself onto them and mounted them, pushing my cock between them. We were so covered in slime that our bodies were thoroughly lubricated, and my cock pushed easily into the tight ring of someone’s asshole.

I heard a dazed, choking whimper, which I distantly recognised as coming from Sophie. Heedless, I pumped my cock into her ass, and immersed myself in the maelstrom of limbs and penetrated orifices and lips and tongues and hands and breasts, hearing Gail’s muffled, agonised gasps and shrieks, Sophie’s throaty, desperate moans, and Alison’s high-pitched, gut-level cries, as my own ass was relentlessly pierced by the dildo. I felt my anal muscles give in to it, and my ass opening up to welcome it, and I screamed with pleasure as I felt myself starting to cum into Sophie’s rectum. At the same moment, Gail let out a hoarse, groaning scream of ecstasy. Alison was sobbing into the back of my neck as her body rippled with a powerful orgasm, her hands clutching my ribs.



By the time we were cumming, and falling apart, and weeping and panting into each other’s throats and crotches and armpits and navels, the four of us sprawling naked and blinded in the muck, we barely knew any more who of us were who.

But gradually, our senses returned, and we came to ourselves, wiping the slime out of our eyes, looking around at each other’s filthy, naked bodies, flushing with shame (but still hot from the flush of climax), too exhausted to try and cover ourselves up. Sophie was withdrawing her cramped and glistening hand from between Gail’s thighs, and trying not to meet Gail’s eyes; behind me, Alison coughed and discreetly dismounted me, pulling the dildo out of me, making me gasp as the tip left my ass.

Gail got out from under Sophie, wincing slightly. Sophie was flexing her hand and breathing heavily – I guessed that she had been fisting Gail, which would have been a new and somewhat shattering experience for both of them. Gail’s face was assuming a look of intense concentration.

“I think we know what that was,” she said quietly.

“Oh yes,” Alison mumbled. Sophie fished her glasses out of the muck, wiped them with a clean corner of her discarded bathrobe, and put them on. She looked around, then turned to look at the door - then she froze and hissed “There!”

We all turned.

Standing in the doorway, over seven feet tall, was a shambling, green, shaggy manlike object. I thought of my copies of Swamp Thing – but this thing didn’t look so patient. It had what, on a human, would have been called a mane of hair-like stuff, resembling weeds, that it tossed back. It looked like it was sneering at us.

“Thanks for the memories,” it rasped, in a deep, scratchy voice that nevertheless had something very familiar about it. It held up one hand – it was holding the digital camera.

“Good luck finding me,” it said. “Just so you know that the Chancellor can find out how you spend your evenings. See you.” And with impressive speed, it bounded off in a loping run down the corridor.

We were all silent.

“I think,” said Gail, “we now know what happened to Matthew.”

“I also think,” said Alison quietly, “we need to clean up this mess, and never mention this again unless we absolutely have to.”

We got our feet, and without bothering to dress, we laboriously cleaned up every drop of molasses, custard, extinguisher foam and bodily fluid from the lab floor and tabletop, then we showered together in a grim silence – after all, we no longer had anything to hide from each other – and we put on what was left of our clothes. By then, it was the small hours, and we went out to the car park and the four of us walked, still in silence, to Alison’s car.

She drove the four of us back to her house, where we sat around the kitchen table and had a stiff whiskey each. Not a word was spoken. Then, as it was beginning to grow light, we climbed wearily up the stairs, took our clothes off, fell as one into Alison’s enormous bed and slept for hours, Alison wrapped around Sophie, while Gail and I slept in each other’s arms.

I woke around midday the next day, as I lay next to Gail, watching her and Alison and Sophie sleep, I knew, with a sense of dread, that this was all going to finally get out, and then it was going to be taken out of our hands, and somebody was going to fuck it up even worse than we had done.

And sure enough, that’s what happened. But things don’t always turn out as unambiguously bad as you’d feared. Sometimes, an apparent enemy becomes an ally; an obstacle can be turned into a weapon; a disability can be employed as a talent. We didn’t know, at the time, that was what was going to happen; all we knew for certain is that it was going to get worse, before it got better. And it did.

And the way that it got worse could have been predicted all along.

The Americans got involved.

My Field Work (Part 5)

More bulletins from the cutting edge of biology...if you're new to this story, you'd better read the first four chapters or you won't know who's who and what's going on...sorry, but I'm new to this serial stuff...

Two weeks later, Sophie was a fully-fledged member of the research team. She turned out to have an extraordinary fund of arcane botanical knowledge, as well as a vast amount of reading in the folk-history of malevolent plants. She also quickly became Gail and my closest friend; all three of us had had the most intimate experiences with the trees, and this knowledge bonded us together. She spent most evenings having dinner with us, and we even made efforts to hook her up with some of the more eligible guys we knew, but she was always a bit disappointed in them. "They don't know," she would say, smiling at us wistfully over coffee, the day after a date. "They just don't know what we know." Once or twice, late at night, Gail and I had talked about inviting Sophie for a threesome – I did envy Gail for having had such intimate contact with Sophie, even if it had been enforced – but we never had the nerve to ask her. She had a poise and a natural reserve that deterred us.

What was strange was how easy it had been to get Sophie onto the staff. We could only assume that Alison, our Head of Department, had pulled strings; it seemed like only a day went by from Sophie being an obscure primary schoolteacher to her joining one of the most secret and highly-qualified research groups in the country. There was no question about her ability, just about how weirdly quickly the usual red tape seemed to have been cut.

As the days went by, though, research ground to a halt. The tree stopped attacking us, and we were no closer to solving the mysterious dissolution of Matthew. (Matthew's wealthy family were skirting around the college, sending threatening emails, and talking about legal action unless we could produce some proof of where he was.) We had placed the tiny Matthew seed into cold storage, until we worked out what to do with it. Gail wanted to plant it in the greenhouse, like a regular seed; Sophie wanted to grow it in more controlled conditions; I personally wanted to dissect it, but then I was never the most compassionate of us.

Then, one day, Alison called Gail, Sophie and I into her office.

It was a hot Friday afternoon. We sat opposite Alison, all three of us grubby from a morning's work, and waited for her to stop staring out of the window. Eventually she turned to us.

"It's the tree," she said flatly. "I'm worried that research isn't going anywhere."

"If we had more money –" Gail began.

"It's not money," said Alison impatiently. "You have exactly as much funding as won't start people whispering, and no more. I can't give you any more. This is potentially one of the major scientific discoveries of the new century. I wouldn't have put you in charge of it if I didn't think you could find something out about it. The reason I'm saying this is, there's a lot of interest in this project, and you aren't moving forward."

"What sort of interest?" asked Sophie, frowning slightly. Her glasses, broken during her assault by the tree, were still held together with tape.

"You don't need to know that. The point is that I'm not totally happy with the way you're going about this. I have invested considerable time and effort in protecting you, and so far you've produced very little in the way of hard evidence about what this thing wants, and why it does what it does."

"It wants to fuck people," said Gail quietly. "It's able to sexually assault people, and as long as they're reasonably psychically healthy in the first place, they don't experience it as trauma but as acutely intense and satisfying. Trouble is, the side-effects are acute attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, and when this waste is voided on the ground, new organisms propagate themselves. Surely it's obvious that it needs human DNA to reproduce."

"That doesn't explain what happened between Andy and Matthew," said Alison. I blushed. She had clearly watched the tape of Matthew fucking me.

"This is not an easy subject to test, Alison!" said Gail, getting angry. "Anyone who goes near it tends to get fucked in every available orifice! We can't exactly advertise for test subjects! So far, it's concentrated on Andy and Sophie and me, and we've been able to handle it. But what about Tricia? And Stephen? They're okay now, but they're still seeing counsellors. What about Matthew, for fuck's sake?"

Alison looked at Gail coldly.

"Gail, there's no call for raised voices. I'm merely pointing out that your team has been working on this thing for two months, and so far you haven't even begun to formulate a hypothesis about why it uses humans this way, as a medium for its seed. I have to say, I feel very disappointed."

"Maybe," said Sophie very quietly, "you would feel a little bit different about it, if it had happened to you."

Alison looked at her, and a faint smile passed over her face.

"It's funny you should say that, Sophie. I've noticed that every person it has assaulted has been either male, or a pre-menopausal female."

Sophie's eyes narrowed behind her glasses.

"And?" she asked.

"So what I propose," Alison went on confidently, "is that I take over from Gail, as head of the research team. I passed menopause three years ago. I am, technically at least, no longer fertile. I would be very surprised if it made any attempt on me. I think I have the necessary distance, both mentally and biologically, to approach this thing and discover some hard facts."

We were all silent. I had a sudden, evil brainwave.

"I think you might be right, Alison," I said, matter-of-factly. Gail rounded on me, and was about to speak, but I gave her the briefest glance and she stopped, watching me keenly. I went on: "It could well be that, because we've had the extraordinary experiences we've had, we lack a certain, as you say, distance. I really think it might be the best thing for the project if you have a go at this thing yourself."

Alison smiled warmly. "I'm glad you see it that way. Gail, how are you about this?"

Gail looked at me, then at Sophie, then back at me, and I caught a faint twinkle of complicity in her eyes. Sophie had the ghost of a smile on her face.

"Maybe Andy is right," Gail admitted, with a superb imitation of somebody giving in to superior reasoning. "Maybe it's better if you try. I think maybe we are too close to the whole thing."

Alison beamed at us, and the meeting was over.

So it was that the four of us gathered, later that day, in the special prep room that had been set up next to the greenhouse. The empty biohazard suits hung on the walls, baggy, all-over bodysuits of thick white plastic, sealed with a strong zipper against the outside world, with a built-in oxygen supply. Gail, Sophie and I arrived first, and we kicked off our shoes and socks, preparatory to putting the suits on. Then, Alison breezed in.

"There'll be a slightly different procedure today," she said, and handed us each a metal tin. "Owing to the nature of this specimen, I've ordered special protection against any kind of pollen-like emission it gives off. Clothes off, please, and cover yourselves in this, then put on the suits. No other clothing." And she took off her jacket and hung it on the door of a locker.

We boggled at each other. "What is this stuff, Alison?" asked Gail. Alison was sitting on a bench, pulling her socks off. She smiled at Gail.

"Just a little something I've been working on. I think it should act as an effective prophylactic. Come on, we're wasting time."

We began to undress. Gail and I, of course, knew each other's bodies, but I was secretly delighted to see Sophie take her clothes off – her body was as tight and rounded as Gail had told me it was. She turned her back on us, shyly, but all it did was give me a guilty chance to glance at her beautiful plump ass. (Gail caught my eye, scowled, and then grinned.)

Alison herself didn't seem the least embarrassed about stripping off. In a few seconds, she was naked, then she straightened up, opened her own tin, and started smearing a translucent gel all over her body. Alison was in her early forties, tall, trim and athletic, with short, cropped reddish-brown hair that was greying slightly; she had the kind of long-nosed, refined face that some people call "handsome"; her breasts were firm and tanned, and so was her strong, muscular ass, suggesting that she either sunbathed nude or went to a tanning salon. Knowing her to be a confirmed health nut, I suspected the former. None of us knew what sort of sex life, if any, Alison had. Gail had more than once remarked that if only somebody could find somebody as pompous and overbearing as Alison attractive, and get her properly laid, then she would personally award them some sort of medal.

Once we were all naked, we slathered ourselves with whatever weird salve Alison had cooked up, and then struggled into our biohazard suits, a process made more difficult than usual by the slippery gel. The opaque plastic restored our modesty, but there was something undeniably erotic about being naked with three other women, even if one was my lover, another had been (however briefly) the object of my lover's desire, and the third was my boss, about whom I had never had an erotic thought in my life. I had to think hard about tax returns to suppress my growing hard-on.

Suited up, we entered the greenhouse. Alison led the way, striding confidently over to the roped-off pathway that led to the tree. Gail glanced at me and rolled her eyes. Without any other clothing, the biohazard suits were very uncomfortable; the gel made them stick to our bare skin.

Alison stepped over the rope and walked up the path. Gail, Sophie and I hung back slightly. None of us were in any sort of the mood to be taken by the tree, and we knew that the suits were not totally protective; a cheerful undergraduate named Tricia had had her suit and the rest of her clothes peeled off her like a sweet wrapper, and only the swift intervention of Gail had managed to get the poor naked girl out of range, before the vines had taken proper hold of her.

Alison turned and looked at us. "What are you waiting for?" she called, the suit muffling her voice. "Look, it's dormant!" Sure enough, the tree was still and silent. It had grown another foot in the last two weeks, and was now some eleven feet tall. Its vines were lying, slack, around the base of its trunk. It was completely still.

Sophie shrugged, and took a step forward. Alison took a tape measure from the utility belt around her waist, and started measuring the trunk's dimensions. Gail and I followed Sophie, carefully edging around the limit of the tree's reach.

"Be careful, Alison," said Sophie.

"I told you, Sophie," said Alison, bending over and running her hand over a slack vine, "it won't try anything on me. It can tell I'm infertile. You stay back if you want, I'll carry on here."

Sophie opened her mouth to speak, when suddenly the vine in Alison's hands sprang into life, coiled around Alison's ankles, and yanked her feet from under her. She crashed to the ground on her stomach and lay for a moment, winded and gasping for breath.

In that moment, she looked up at us, and all three of us saw the sudden fear and dawning realisation cross Alison's face; none of us were immune.

Then, the vines were swarming up her legs and her lower body, and she started to struggle. Sophie ran forward to help her, and a flailing vine smacked her away, sending her flying into a bush, where she landed on her tailbone and yelped with pain. The vines were already tugging at Alison's biohazard suit, and she was desperately trying to get free from them.

"Get them off me!" she cried in horror, and I too ran forward to try and help, but a vine crashed into the side of my head and I was thrown sideways.

"Alison!" Gail shouted. "Don't struggle! It just makes it worse! You have to let it happen!"

"Noo!" Alison cried, as the vines curled over her shoulders and trapped her arms. "I...I can't! Don't let it do this to me!" Gail looked around desperately for some sort of weapon. I was blinking the blood out of my eyes; nearby, Sophie was fighting back the tears of pain and rubbing her bruised tailbone. The questing tips of the vine finally located the fastening of Alison's biohazard suit, and pulled it down, unzipping her suit and dragging it down over her shoulders, exposing her breasts. "NOOO!" Alison screamed, as the suit was steadily hauled down her squirming torso, revealing more and more of her. She looked at us pleadingly. "Pleease! You have to make it stop!"

I staggered to my feet, dazed, and hunted for a weapon of some sort. The vines were pressing Alison to the floor, methodically stripping her naked, and by the time I had managed to find a large pair of secateurs, the suit had been pulled down over her bare ass and was sliding down her legs, bunching around her ankles. And, sure enough, the glistening, bulbous, thick-headed vines were swarming underneath Alison's crotch and pressing hard between the tight cheeks of her bottom. "Oh NO! NO! PLEEASE! OH GOD!" she screamed, and then her face contorted and she let out a gut-wrenching moan, as the vines penetrated her in front and behind.

I looked at Gail, who was clearly thinking hard. She looked at me, and shouted through her mask, "It's not doing what it normally does! It hasn't covered her head, it hasn't tied her to itself...what's it doing?"

"I think it's testing her," said Sophie, who had limped up to us. "It's not sure if she is a suitable carrier! We need to ask her what it's doing!"

Alison was squirming and letting out loud moans of protest as the tree fucked her. She was quite naked now, her arms held down, her hips and legs wrapped tightly in the vines, but her head was still free. Gail shouted "ALISON!" Alison opened her eyes and her wet eyes focused on Gail. Her body was shaking with each thrust from the tree.

"We need to know what it's doing to you, Alison!" said Gail. We saw Alison trying to collect herself, and we knew how unbelievably humiliating and undignified this was for her. She bit her lip, and closed her eyes again.

"It's fucking me," she said thickly. "It's in my vagina and my anus. Oh God, it's so...it's reaching around inside my womb...uuuUUNHHH!" She grimaced, and then whimpered, and this time it was hard to tell whether it was pain or ecstasy that she was feeling. "It's feeling inside me," she gasped. "It's like it's looking for something...oh, oh...oh wait...the one in my anus...oh my God, it's swelling...oh Jesus! I feel like I have to...aaaaAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Oooooh! Oh JeeeEESUS!"

And suddenly, Alison seemed to be overcome, as the vine that was pushed up into her ass began to fuck her with incredible vigour. Her firm, tanned ass cheeks quivered under the assault, and her hips were raised off the floor with the force of her buggery. Her head lolled, and she made only repeated groans of pain and lust: "AAUNNH! AAUUNNH! AAUUNH!" More vines wrapped themselves around our unfortunate administrator, and then, to our amazement, she was lifted bodily off the ground, high in the air, still being energetically sodomised by the tree. Her head was sagging, her face red and dripping sweat, and she could only moan incoherently with desire.

Gail, Sophie and I instinctively ran forward, and immediately regretted our mistake when dozens of vines suddenly burst out of the soil and grabbed us. We struggled for help, but the vines took only seconds to rip open our biohazard suits and swarm over our naked bodies. I saw Gail's face contort with pain as a vine pushed into her ass, and then I screamed with the force of the vine that penetrated my own anus. More vines coiled around my cock, pulling on me, and my arms were lashed to my sides. I was pushed up against Gail, who was struggling to stay conscious, still trying to observe what happened, and then Sophie's naked body crashed into ours as all three of us were lashed together. Sophie was cursing and writhing, sweat beading on her forehead as she tried to fight off the insistent pressure of being fucked in her pussy and ass, but then the tree grabbed our heads and pulled them back, so that we looked up.

Alison was being held, naked, twitching and upside-down, over the top of the tree-trunk, which was opening into what looked from below like a huge mouth. She opened her eyes slightly, then they widened and her face froze, then she started struggling wildly, and screamed in terror. "NO! PLEASE! GOD! NOOO! DOON'T!" The tree was lowering her, head-first, inexorably into the mouth. Alison fought desperately, whimpering, her naked body straining against the vines, but she came closer and closer to the mouth. Her head disappeared behind the "lips", and then her screams turned to muffled, liquid gurgling and choking, then there was just the sound of bubbles as she was lowered head-first up to her shoulders, then her chest, then her waist, then her naked ass, the vine still pushed between them, sodomising her - her legs still feebly kicking, then at last the vines let go of her, and her feet sank into the mouth, and the mouth closed over them with a satisfied smack.

Sophie and Gail and I were appalled. Had Alison been killed? We yelled and struggled to get out, but the vines swarmed up and covered us completely, blindfolding us, pushing into our mouths, and we could only give in as we were quickly, roughly, brutally fucked in every orifice. Our orgasms tore through us, and then just as we had each come with tortured, muffled whimpers, the vines fell away from us and we were dumped onto the greenhouse path.

We checked that each of us were okay, then we turned and looked at the tree. Sophie's face was wet with tears, and I didn't blame her; if Alison was dead, we were going to have our revenge. But then, the tree seemed to bulge in the middle, it creaked, and quivered. We started to scramble away, but not quick enough – it suddenly split down its length, and a four-foot orifice opened up, spilling dozens of gallons of thick, viscous white sap all over us, followed by a warm human body, completely coated with the tree's seminal fluid.

Alison landed on me, and at last I knew what I must have looked like when Matthew had messily spent himself all over my own naked body. She was a featureless, white, sticky, humanoid form. We dragged her out of the tree's range, and then she coughed, and a hole appeared where her mouth was. We quickly cleared her breathing passages, and she took a huge gulp of air, then whispered "Thank you." Gail carefully wiped the muck out of Alison's eyes, and our shell-shocked administrator gazed up at us, her green eyes shining with something. She looked almost newborn.

"Are you okay, Alison?" asked Sophie. The three of us were bruised, sore and bleeding, but we were intensely relieved that Alison was alive.

"I think so," she breathed. "Oh my God...it was horrible, but it was also so...so..."

"Don't try to talk too much," I said. "Do you feel sick at all?"

"No," she said, "not at all...listen, I...I'm sorry. I didn't understand before. I think I get it now. God. It was so...so incredible." And she managed a weak smile.

We helped Alison to her feet, and then, with Gail, Sophie and I supporting her, the four of us staggered out of the greenhouse. That was enough "research" for one day.

My Field Work (Part 4)

The Superintendent looked from me, sitting wrapped only in a blanket, to Gail, who was still blushing, and his eyes narrowed. He may have been slow, but he wasn't stupid.

"If you have anything to say, Miss, now's the time to say it," he said. Gail pulled up a chair, sat down and took a deep breath.

This was what she told us:

She had gone straight into the lab that morning, and she had been weeding some plants in the greenhouse when Alison Carey, our Head of Department, had called her over to the door.

Gail had gone over to see what was happening. Alison was a good Head of Department, a smart, attractive, confident woman in her forties, but she was insufferably bossy and seemed to have no idea about what were the real priorities of research. She was always asking us to do this or that trivial assignment, instead of assigning them to younger students who were less needed on the tough jobs. She was standing in the corridor, her clipboard in her hand, and her usual aloof expression on her face. Nearby stood a young, very pretty, bespectacled black woman, dressed primly in a neat skirt, a grey sweater and sensible shoes. Her hair was swept back in a tight bun. Behind her was a crowd of about twenty bored-looking children, none of them older than ten.

"Gail," said Alison, "this is Sophie Makeba, and this is her class. They're on a special trip to the Biology Department. I want you to show them around a little. Miss Makeba, this is Gail Dawson, one of our ablest grad students."

Miss Makeba smiled at Gail and turned to her class.

"Say hello to Miss Dawson," she said. She had a precise manner of speech, and the faintest accent – Gail guessed she was probably an African immigrant. The class droned in chorus, "Hel-lo, Miss Daw-son." Miss Makeba beamed at Gail, leaned forward, and said with a smile, "It's okay. You can call me Sophie."

Gail groaned inwardly. What a treat – showing a bunch of pissed-off pre-teens through the department, every one of them out of their minds with boredom at having to do a school trip on a weekend. She cursed Alison for palming this job off on her, when any number of freshers could have been enlisted.

"Well, Miss Makeba," said Alison, "I'll leave you to it. Have a nice time."

"Thank you very much," said Sophie Makeba, nodding vigorously. Alison nodded at them both, turned on her heel and swept off.

"Okay, um, if you'll just follow me," said Gail, and she led them away down the corridor. Miss Makeba seemed to be genuinely interested in what was going on, unlike her pupils, who seemed to be continually hitting each other and asking if they could go to the bathroom. She was bright and knowledgeable and was doing her best to communicate her enthusiasm to her pupils, but it wasn't working.

Gail led them through the labs, showed them the computer room, the offices and the research library. All along, Sophie Makeba was keenly interested, and the kids could hardly contain their own impatience.

"This is where we keep most of our plants," Gail said, opening the greenhouse door, and a little embarrassed at pointing out the extremely obvious. Sophie Makeba nodded, and told off a small boy for picking leaves off a rare flower. Gail pointed out the most interesting specimens (the kids hardly paid attention), while Sophie Makeba asked insightful and highly technical questions about them. Gail guessed she must have been a botany grad at some point.

They made their way through the maze of paths and walkways. One of the paths was roped off.

"And what is down there?" asked Sophie Makeba.

"Ah," said Gail. What was down there was one of the extraordinary trees, the prime object of our research, which had been painstakingly uprooted as a sapling and which, under hothouse conditions, had grown to full size frighteningly quickly. There was no way Gail was leading this party anywhere near it. The students themselves only went near it in biohazard suits, and even then, there had been unfortunate accidents. Two students had needed counselling.

"That's where we keep the poisonous stuff," Gail whispered in Sophie Makeba's ear. "I didn't want to say, in case the kids got excited. I can't take you down there, sorry. It's classified as a biological hazard." Sophie Makeba nodded, smiled and squeezed Gail's arm.

"I understand," she said. "It's no problem."

Gail led them away and pointed out some rare orchids. Sophie Makeba went to make a note. "That's funny," she said, "I must have dropped my pen. Has anyone seen my pen?" There was a chorus of "Noo" from the children. The young woman made her way back down the line of them and peered at the ground. She looked down the roped-off path and then looked up at Gail and smiled.

"Ah, I see it," she called. "It rolled down here. I'll just duck in and get it." And she stepped over the rope.

"I wouldn't do that!" said Gail urgently, and pushed through the children. But Sophie Makeba was walking up the path.

"It's fine," she was saying, "I won't touch anything…" She disappeared from sight behind a thick bush. The children complained as Gail struggled past them, but all of a sudden, she heard a terrible, familiar SCHHHLUPPP!, followed by a muffled squeal.

She quickly turned around and faced the kids.

"Come on, children, let's get out of here! Who'd like an ice cream?" For the first time all morning, their faces lit up. Gail hustled them out of the greenhouse and slammed the door shut behind them. Her stomach was in knots and she had to get the kids out of there as quick as possible.

"Where's Miss Makeba?" asked a little boy.

"She's coming in a second," said Gail, sweating. Through the greenhouse door, she could hear muffled moans and whimpers from the poor, trapped schoolteacher.

"What's she doing in there?" the boy asked.

"It sounds like she's doing sex," said a solemn-faced little girl. Gail went pale.

"Nonsense," she said briskly. "She's, um, tying her shoelace."

"What's sex?" asked a small, red-haired girl. The solemn-faced girl looked at her scornfully.

"You don't know what doing sex is? You're so stupid, Sherry O'Brien."

"I am not stupid! You're a bitch, Mandy Pendleton!"

"Ssshh, children," hissed Gail, desperately dialling Alison's number on her mobile phone.

"When a man and a woman love each other," said Mandy Pendleton loftily, "the man lies on top of the woman and they take their shirts off and they rub their belly buttons together."

"EEWWWWWWWW!"

"That's disgusting!"

"You're making it up!"

"And then six months later they go to the hospital and they get a baby from the doctors."

"Alison? It's Gail. You need to get here right away. We've got a bit of a situation with Miss Makeba. Yeah. Code red."

The sound of repeated, rhythmical groans leaked through the greenhouse door.

"But you're not allowed to do it till you're eighteen," added Mandy Pendleton.

"Do you have to do it?" asked Sherry O'Brien, who had turned quite green.

"Yes," said Mandy Pendleton gleefully.

"I want to go to the bathroom," said Sherry O'Brien miserably. At last, Alison came running round the corner and up to the door. "I'll take care of these," she told Gail. "You'd better get in there and help her. Come on, children, we're going to have ice cream." She led the children off down the corridor and Gail took a second to breathe a sigh of relief, then opened the door and slipped inside.

She threaded down the maze of paths and got to the forbidden zone. Carefully, she stepped over the rope and edged along the path until she could see the tree.

It was just as she had feared. Sophie Makeba's clothes were lying in torn rags all over the place. Her dark, naked body was tightly bound with a tangle of tough green vines, and a large pseudopodium had completely engulfed her head. A thick rope of vine was pushed up between her jutting ass cheeks and was buggering her, and Gail could see that another had snaked up into her vagina and was sliding back and forth within her. Her arms were lashed behind her back, and tendrils had curled around her firm breasts and were stroking her dark nipples. She was making the most indescribable noises, and her body was squirming and being rhythmically jolted as the tree fucked her.

Even while she was desperately figuring out how to free her from the tree, Gail couldn't help noticing that, stripped of her prim teacher's outfit, Sophie Makeba had a gorgeous body. Her tight, protuberant ass had a physical echo in the globes of her round, heavy breasts, wrapped and enveloped by the thick vines of the tree. The thought wouldn't leave Gail's head, and she felt suddenly dizzy, overcome by a sudden feeling of lust. It's the damn tree, she told herself. It wants you up there, too. Fight it! You have to get her out of there!

Nobody had ever managed to free anyone from the tree before it had finished with them. It seemed impervious to fire, pesticide and even metal – saw blades just juddered off its bark, which could become spongy and voluptuous when it wanted to, and tough as rock when it was under attack. Gail knew that she couldn't intimidate the tree into letting Sophie Makeba go, so she would have to distract it.

There was nothing else for it. She would have to offer herself as a substitute. It had never been tried, but this was an emergency. Gail quickly undressed, and walked up to the tree, stark naked, her arms open wide.

"Come on!" she called. "You know me! Let her go! Take me again! I want it!" Gail had no idea if the tree could understand her, but it suddenly stopped fucking the young schoolteacher and merely held her tight, as if pondering. There was a muffled, dazed whimper from the pod that enclosed Sophie Makeba's head.

"That's right!" urged Gail. "Take me! I want you to do it! Let her go and take me!" She stepped up closer to the tree. She wasn't afraid that it might trick her – all of its vines and fronds were occupied in binding and invading the naked young black woman. She moved a little closer to the tree, and laid a hand on its trunk.

"Come on," she said softly. "Let her go. If you must take someone, take me. She's an innocent, she doesn't know what's happening to her. Take me."

There was a silence. Sophie Makeba trembled, lashed tight with vines, her head engulfed, vines penetrating her pussy and her ass. Gail's heart ached for her, and she reached out and gave her a reassuring pat on her left buttock.

"Don't worry, Sophie," she whispered. "We'll have you free in a jiffy…"

Suddenly, with terrifying speed, a dense tangle of fresh vines erupted from the soil around the roots of the tree, and spiralled around Gail's bare ankles, locking her in place. She gasped and turned to run, but the vines shot up her legs and swarmed all over her naked body, around her waist, coiling about her head, fastening her arms behind her back, and slithering between her legs, pushing insistently between her pale ass cheeks. Gail screamed "No! NO! You BASTARD! NOOO!" She had been tricked! The vines withed and swarmed up over her eyes, pushing into her mouth, and she choked and let out a "MMMMMMM!", but then she was already being lifted off her feet, and the thick, slimy vine tips were forcing themselves into her vagina and her anus. It was happening again, and the flood of lust was pouring through her just as it had before.

Gail writhed, forcing her hips back and down onto the twin, impaling vines that were fucking her, and through the thick coils of vines that were wrapped around her head, she could hear Sophie Makeba's rhythmic squealing – "MM! MM! MM! MMM!" Oh God, she had failed utterly to rescue the girl – but the desperate need to be fucked by the tree was driving the shame of her failure from her mind.

Then she felt a warm body against hers, and the vines that separated them drawing apart and lashing them close together. The tree was tying her to Sophie! Gail was mortified at being so intimately in contact with the girl, but she was so electrified with lust that she could do little but whimper as her breasts rubbed against the other girl's naked back. The vines kept pumping into Gail's ass and pussy, and she was dragged down Sophie's body until her face was pressed between the young teacher's naked ass cheeks. The pressure on the back of her head increased, and Gail's blindfold face was pushed deeper, parting the other girl's buttocks, until she could feel the vine that was in Sophie's ass touching her own chin. Sophie was trying desperately to move her hips away, but her struggles were feeble, and her moans were taking on a more voluptuous and less panicked tone.

The vines in Gail's mouth pulled out of her, and she whimpered "Please, no, please don't make me do this, oh please no, oh God…", but her blindfold face was inexorably pushed up against Sophie's anus, and with a long, slow, "MMMFFF!", Gail gave in. The vine in Sophie's ass pulled out of her, and Gail's lips were pressed up against the poor girl's tortured, tight little asshole. Gail kissed it and tongued it as lovingly as she could – which wasn't much, considering they were both still being bound and raped by the tree – and Sophie whimpered pitifully inside the prison of the pod that enclosed her head.

Gail's tongue eased itself up into the girl's anus, and Sophie shuddered, with a long, low moan. Gail felt the fucking in her own ass and vagina increase in urgency, and she deliriously fucked Sophie's ass with her tongue, causing the girl to squeal with ecstasy and shudder violently once more, her ass cheeks clenching around Gail's face. Gail gasped for breath as she desperately tongued Sophie's anus, feeling the vine swell and expand inside her own rectum, while her pussy was on fire, slick with juices – she felt her nipples tingling as the vines stroked them, her whole body urged on to orgasm, and she pushed her hard little tongue as hard as it would go into Sophie's ass – and then there was a muffled, agonised, ecstatic wail, as Sophie came, her body shaking all over, quickly followed by Gail, letting herself go, relaxing into it – and then, finally, the tree erupted into orgasm.

The sticky white sap boiled up inside the pod and burst over Sophie's head and shoulders, flowing in gallons over her body and incidentally drenching Gail, whose face was still buried between Sophie's naked ass cheeks. The pressure burst inside Gail and she felt the sap filling up inside her and exploding out of her ass and pussy, before the vines were blessedly loosened and the two exhausted, sap-coated, naked young women fell away from the tree and landed in a bruised, tangled heap on the path.

Gail whimpered, coughed and wiped the sap out of her eyes. Sophie was unrecognisable, a barely humanoid form, moving feebly beneath a thick coating of the white goo. Gail quickly cleared it from the girl's face.

Sophie's eyes focused on hers. "Oh my God," she gasped. "What happened?"

"I know, Sophie, it's okay," said Gail, panting for breath. "It's happened to me, too. It's not your fault."

"It was so terrible," the young teacher said, trembling, "and yet…I have never…nothing like that…I never knew it could be so…was that you? Did we…?"

Gail blushed and nodded. "It made me. It uses people. You shouldn't feel ashamed, there was nothing either of us could do."

Sophie shook her head, wide-eyed. "I should feel ashamed. I should. I don't do this, I really don't…but I don't feel ashamed. Why is that?"

"I don't know," said Gail. "We're still investigating it. Look, let me help you." She held out her hands and Sophie staggered to her feet, naked, the sap dripping heavily off her body. The two young women limped down the path, out of the tree's range, and they sat down on the ground again. Gail saw that Alison was hovering anxiously in the doorway. She nodded to her: it'll be OK.

Sophie groaned and put a hand to her mouth. Gail, too, felt the nausea hit her. "It's okay," she managed to say, "let it happen…", and then she rolled onto her hands and knees and threw up gouts of green slime onto the path, even as, humiliatingly, a jet of it voided from her ass. She glimpsed Sophie, bent over and clutching her stomach, puking onto the verge and coughing as the green juice shot out of her own ass – and then they each threw up once more, and then it had passed.

Sophie was lying, weak, on her back, on the ground, looking up at the ceiling.

"The children," she murmured. "They didn't see…?"

"No, we got them out of here," said Gail, wiping her mouth. "Thank God," said Sophie, and then she laughed softly.

"What is it?" Gail asked. Sophie turned her head and smiled wearily. "I was just thinking," she said with a low chuckle, "this would not look good at the next PTA meeting…teacher raped by tree. I don't think it would be a great career move, hah?"

Gail smiled. Two female students in Biohazard suits were coming down the path with blankets. Gail nodded a hello to them, struggled to her feet and helped Sophie to stand. Sophie leaned on her, her legs trembling, her head lolling. Gail gave her an encouraging squeeze. After all they had been through, after what the tree had done to them, and what it had made Gail do to Sophie, it seemed ridiculously petty, but Sophie took Gail's hand and gave a weak squeeze in return.

"We'd better get cleaned up," Gail said. Sophie nodded. And then, to Gail's amazement, Sophie kissed her fondly on the cheek. Gail stared at her. Sophie was smiling, but her eyes looked serious.

"Thank you for trying to save me," she said. And then she laughed softly once again. "Maybe it was time for a new career, anyway."

When Gail had finished this story, the Superintendent looked like somebody had told him that he'd grown a parrot out of the back of his head.

"What happened to the teacher? We need to talk to her. She may want to press charges against the college. This is very serious."

"There won't be any charges against the college," said a quiet voice. We turned.

Standing in the doorway was a young woman wearing an oversized college t-shirt and a pair of baggy sweatpants. Her glasses were held together with tape. Her black hair was swept back into a frizzy ponytail. Her skin was rich and dark – but also pale with tiredness. Her eyes looked bloodshot, and she was leaning wearily against the doorframe, sagging like someone after a long race. She held a steaming coffee cup. She glanced at Gail, and then at me, but she spoke to the Superintendent.

"Gail did her best to save me. It's not her fault what happened. I won't be pressing charges. The children have gone home, they know nothing of what took place. But I will be informing the school about my resignation." She stepped into the room and had a long gulp of coffee, and then she spoke to Gail and me.

"What happened has changed me forever. I must know more. I don't suppose it means much to you, but I have made some study of plants like these, in my own country. I would very much like to work with you, on this. I think we can learn from each other. Do you think that will be okay?"

Gail put her arm around me and squeezed. I grinned. Gail held out her hand, I held out my hand, and Sophie came forward. We all three shook hands. And Sophie smiled.

To be continued...