Edward Lee: Selected Stories
Author: Edward Lee
Date: 2016-07-28 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: From the Legend of the Hardcore/Extreme Horror Fiction, 10 stories selected by the Author. It contains: The First Header (A portion of ‘Header 2’, 2010); Pay Me (from ‘Quest for Sex Truth and Reality’, 1993); Make a Wish (from 'Carnal Surgery’, 2011); Makak (from 'Brain Cheese Buffet’, 2010); A Header Tale (Promo chapette for Header DVD, 2006); A Header Tale Part II (Promo chapette for ‘Header 2’, 2010); The Cities of Sixties (Promo chapette for ‘Infernally Yours’, 2009); The Deliltry of Elemental Valence (from‘Skull Full of Spurs’, 2000); Chef (from ‘In Laymon’s Term’, 2011); Ever Nat (from ‘
Publisher: INDEPENDENT LEGIONS PUBLISHING

Edward Lee – Selected Stories

ISBN: 978-88-99569-21-1

Copyright (Edition) ©2016 Independent Legions Publishing

Copyright (Text) ©Edward Lee

1° edition epub/mobipocket: 1.0 July 2016

Digital Layout: Lukha B. Kremo - kremo@kipple.it

Proofreading: Jodi Renée Lester

Cover Art by Giampaolo Frizzi

www.independentlegions.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The First Header

(A portion of ‘Header 2’, 2010)

Pay Me

(Originally published in ‘Quest for Sex Truth and Reality’, 1993)

Make a Wish

(Originally published in ‘Carnal Surgery’, 2011)

Makak

(Originally published in ‘Brain Cheese Buffet’, 2010)

A Header Tale

(Promo chapette for Header DVD, 2006)

A Header Tale Part II

(Promo chapette for ‘Header 2’, 2010)

The Cities of Sixties

(Promo chapette for ‘Infernally Yours’, 2009)

The Deliltry of Elemental Valence

(Originally published in ‘Skull Full of Spurs’, 2000)

Chef

(Originally published in ‘In Laymon’s Term’, 2011)

Ever Nat

(Originally published in ‘Bullet Through Your Face’, 2010)

Edward Lee

Selected Stories

THE FIRST HEADER

Ten minutes was all it took for the young and eagle-eyed Micky-Mack to bag several squirrels, and a few minutes after that, those squirrels were promptly skinned and gutted via Helton’s big buck knife. Now the tasty rodents roasted slowly on steak skewers over the roaring campfire outside the truck. The smell was delectable, and it was unfortunate that one of the family’s favorite meals would be tainted by the specter of death, sin, and secrets that hovered over many backwoods folks. They all sat on logs, keeping warm the way men were meant to. Dumar and Micky-Mack looked expectantly to their elder.

“Well, Paw?” Dumar asked.

“We’s waitin’,” Micky-Mack added, antsy by the mystery of what it was that so pained Helton to relate.

“The time’a reckonin’ is upon us, boys,” Helton began, eyes reflecting firelight and something like dark wonder. “We done got our chops busted by this evil man Paulie, and nows we’s out fer our revenge. It’s been the law of the land since time began. Someone do you wrong when you ain’t deserved it, then ya got no choice but to do him wrong even worse. Says so in the Bible”—he pronounced “Bible” as bob-ul. “Says ‘a eye fer an eye.’ ” Helton sipped some soda yet scarcely tasted it. “What I got ta tell ya both tonight hurts me right in my heart—”

“It hurt me in my heart, Paw!” Dumar raised his voice, “Seein’ my boy kilt so awful!”

“Simmer down,” Helton ordered. “And listen. In these parts, for years and years, folks been feudin’ over this’n that. It’s part’a man’s nature, I s’pose. But sometimes folks can be so blammed evil that they’ll do ya a wrong that’s so ever-livin’ bad it seems there ain’t nothin’ you can do back to get yer proper revenge. This happened to our family way back in a war they calt the Civil War when the Yankee army come through here’n started burnin’ our ancestors’ houses down for nothin’ more than retrievin’ the nails out the ashes, which they’d melt down to make more bullets so’s ta kill more decent Southern folk. But that ain’t all they did, see?”

Micky-Mack was so intrigued he sat on the edge of his log. “What else they do, Unc?”

Helton’s voice lowered to a grim rattle. “They round up all the gals in all the nearby towns, even li’l girls nine, ten years old, and they made ’em all live fer a month in what they called a Sibley Camp on account that’s what the tents they put up was called—Sibley tents, and what they turned this camp into…was a fuckin’ camp.”

“A what, Paw?” Dumar asked.

“It were a camp, son, where Yankees from all over could come and git thereselfs a piece’a ass. A blammed rape camp’s what it was! The Yankee general was a black-hearted cad the name’a Hildreth—it’s him was the one who order this big camp put up, and by the hunnerts, the Yankee soldiers’d come to git their willies up in our gals and fill ’em with their evil Yankee peckersnot, and General Hildreth, what he done is he charged each soldier a five-cent piece fer each nut they git in the camp, making profit on his crimes against our gals!”

Helton’s rancor echoed through the woods. He had to recompose himself. “And, see, bein’ that the gals was forced ta live in this camp fer over a month, they’se all wound up pregnant, and General Hildreth, he like that a whole lot, he did, cos even after his Yankees left, these poor gals’d pop out kids they’d have to raise, just bringin’ more’n more hardship on ’em. And worser than that even was that whiles the gals was in the camp, they weren’t givin’ nothin’ to eat, so’s one’a the gals—name’a Constance McKinney, it was—she were kind’a the speaker fer all the poor gals. What she do is she say to General Hildreth, ‘Please, general, ya gots to give my gals some food ever so often, else we all starve to death!’ So ya know what General Hildreth did? He give each gal a tin cup and then he laugh back ta Constance’n said, ‘Each time one of my men gets his nut up your dirty Rebel pussies, you just stand up and put this cup between your legs and let my men’s jism dribble in the cup…cos that’s all you’re ever gonna get ta eat while you’re here! Ain’t no way I’m wasting a single morsel of food on Rebel bitches!’”

“God dang, Unc Helton!” Micky-Mack wailed. He and Dumar were clearly unsettled. “Shorely only the most evilest’a men’d make gals live on cum!”

The shadow of Helton’s nodding head loomed huge in the forest behind them. “Oh, they was evil, all right, boy, evil as if they was the sons’a Lucifer hisself. Our poor gals got fucked or sodder-mized probably a thousand times each by those dag-blasted Yanks. Eventually, though, they moved on, leavin’ our towns burnt and dester-toot. See, the Yanks et all the livestock theirselfs, but what was left they kilt’n left ta rot so’s no one else could have it, and they burnt all the fields too. That blammed Hildreth even sent his men inta the woods to kill every animal they could see; he didn’t want nothin’ left for the folks here to eat. And, a’course, all them poor gals was knocked up and their bellies full’a Yankee bastards…”

Dumar and Micky-Mack shivered, not from the chill air but from the macabre suspense being conveyed by the fire.

“Weren’t long after, the war ended, and the town’s men that didn’t get kilt or die in Yankee prison camps, they come back home, but imagine their horror when they did. Town in ashes, fields destroyed, folks livin’ on roots’n head lice’n tree bark’n worms, their wives rack-skinny’n traumer-tized’n with a Yankee baby on their tit. It’s said that a good many’a our boys hanged theirselves in despair when they seed that.” Helton eyed the two young men. “But there were a pair’a Rebel soldiers who come back, and they didn’t kill theirselfs, no sir! They decided to do somethin’ ’bout it!”

“What, Paw? What?” Dumar pleaded.

“They hunt down them evil Yankees’n kill ’em, Unc?”

Helton raised a silencing finger. “Listen ta me now, cos this is important. These two men I’m speakin’ of? One was a fella named Clyde Martin—”

“Hey!” Micky-Mack exclaimed. “That’s my last name!”

“Dang straight it is, boy, cos this soldier, Clyde Martin, is yer direct ancestor, and the other fella, he was Lemuel Tuckton—”

“So, Paw,” Dumar calculated, “you’n me, we’s related to him?”

“Yes, we is. He’s my great, great grandfather, son. It’s the blood’a these two men—these heroes—that all of us gots runnin’ in our veins. When they seed what General Hildreth did to the town, they got all in a swivet, they did. And they decided to go after him.”

“Please, Paw! Tell us they kilt Hildreth in a bad way!”

Did Helton smile in the crackling firelight? “After the war, Hildreth, he go back to someplace calt Filler-delfia, became mayor. Lived in a big mansion with pillars out front, had a beautiful wife and couple’a children, and his two best officers from the war, he hired ’em ta run his estate. See, Hildreth, he were pig-shit rich from all’a his war crimes over the years. So what Clyde Martin and Lemuel Tuckton do one night is after ridin’ on horseback all the way to Filler-delfia, they snatch them two’a Hildreth’s officers…”

Micky-Mack and Dumar stared.

“Their bodies was found the next day, both dead as dead could be. Had their heads busted open, they did…but it weren’t no ordinary head wound, no. Hildreth ain’t never seen nothin’ like it, so’s he called the family doctor to inspect the bodies. Both the tops’a their skulls was busted open—a ballpeen hammer, probably, the doc said—and ya could see their raw brains still sittin’ inside’a their skulls. But the doc look close at them brains with a magnifyin’ glass, and ya know what he saw?”

“What, Unc Helton! What?”

Helton nodded. “He seed what look like a single knife slit in each brain, then he took a whiff’a them brains—”

“He smelt the dead fellas’ brains?” questioned Micky-Mack in utter puzzlement.

“He smelt ’em, all right,” Helton assured, and it appeared by his demeanor that something joyous deep inside was just itching to get out. “And he rekka-nized the smell, and then he stick his finger inta each slit and felt somethin’ slimy, like snot…”

Dumar’s brow furrowed. “Paw, ain’t no way snot could wind up in a fella’s brain.”

“It weren’t snot, son. It was cum—”

“Cum!” Micky-Mack yelled.

“Dick-loogie, Paw? Peckersnot? That what youse talkin’ ’bout?”

“It shore is, Dumar! Man batter! Joy juice! Cock hock!” Helton affirmed, rising to his feet as the frenzy of the tale he told began to unwind like a spring. “What Clyde Martin’n Lem Tuckton did is they cracked them two officers hard on the top’a their skulls, picked out the pieces’a bone, and stuck a knife in each brain ta make a slit fer their dicks, and then-then”—Helton began to shake—“and then they fucked their brains!”

Micky-Mack almost fell off the log. “They fucked their brains, Unc Helton?”

“Holy sheeeeeeeee-IT, Paw!”

“They fucked their evil Yankee brains, and I’se mean they fucked ’em hard, and they each got theirself a nut, boys!” Helton was reeling. “Then they done the same to all’a Hildreth’s housemaids and servants, snatchin’ ’em two at a time and humpin’ their heads!”—the frenzy rose, veins bulging in Helton’s forehead, eyes wide and gleaming in vengeful delirium—“then they snatched Hildreth’s children—his children!—and they fucked their heads, and then they done the same to his wife! And then, then, they snatched Hildreth himself and they fucked his head ta kingdom come! They fucked that head three times apiece, boys, comin’ each time’n blowin’ their load right inta the middle’a Hildreth’s twisted brain, they did, till his head was full up with their cum, and that, boys”—Helton stomped the ground—“that…is what’cha call a header!”

PAY ME

I’m trying to think what this is.

Providence? A confession? No, not even close. Words like that ring too thinly, don’t you think? Nor could it be anything so stale as a rite of passage. My God, a passage to what?

These are excuses—lies. Like touching a lover’s thigh and feeling shadow instead of flesh.

Sometimes it’s hard to write honestly. Without truth, without the revelation of what things really are, it’s just more lies. More shadows in want of flesh.

It says—in Ezekiel, I think: I make blood your destiny. That’s God talking, not me. And if God can’t reveal the truth, who can?

So I guess that’s what this really is. I guess this is my blood.

Smith wasn’t sure what to make of it; he approached the way dared children might edge toward a house said to be haunted. LIVE SEX! boasted the sign in blue neon. D.C.’S BEST! ALL YOUNG PRETTY GIRLS! LIVE SEX LIVE SEX LIVE SEX!

The place was called The Anvil; Smith smiled at an obvious symbology. He remembered it as one of the many bottomless bars wedged into the city’s porno district. Now, though, it seemed The Anvil had graduated to more definitive designs. Smith felt confused. What, after so many years, had brought him back? He was a writer; he wanted things to write about, real things, real truths in a real world. He wanted substance, not tales; he wanted people and lives and honest experience, not cardboard cut-outs and soap opera dialogue. He figured his professional insights had posted a challenge. So here he was. Couldn’t better judgment, in a sense, also be called cowardice?

Music rocked into the street when he opened the door. He shouldered through a standing crowd in a brick-arched entrance, craning his neck to sense The Anvil’s depth. The twenty-five dollar cover didn’t seem to thwart business—people were jammed in attendance. Smith had come here a few times during college, with friends. It seemed larger now, a cavernous expansion of the layout he remembered. The main stage existed in a stagnant haze of glare, accentuated by multicolored spotlights set to throb with the music. Around all this, dozens of tables and chairs were arranged in uneven concentric circles. The stage was empty, save for an armless chair and a loop harness suspended from the ceiling. The loop cast a shadow like a hangman’s noose.

Two stone-faced city cops eyed for minors near the bar, but no one seemed to care. Smith thought, temporal excommunication. They were invisible here, shunned. Outsiders in the chasm’s jubal.

A large video screen rounded one corner—entertainment between the acts. Smith winced. This was “homegrown” fare; you could always tell by the track marks on the girls’ arms, and forced smiles full of broken teeth. The grainy shot zoomed in from behind for the eloquent close-up of frenetic copulation. Then a cut to the girl’s head rocking on the desk. Was she asleep? Eventually the penis withdrew and offered its obligatory ejaculus externus. High-class stuff, Smith thought.

Consciously he wanted to leave—this was not his territory. Places like this were dangerous and not of his ilk. Drug deals took place here; prostitution was solicited. Fights broke out on a regular basis. There’d even been police raids. But down deep Smith wanted to see—he needed to—as if seeing would verify the reality he pursued, whatever that might be. He was an outsider, too, goody-two-shoes in the den of iniquity. His discomfort excited him; it made him feel, somehow, more like a writer. Cowards die a thousand times, he reflected and almost laughed. But when he began to search for a table, his arm was grabbed, spinning him around. Suddenly a girl was shouting in his face. “Hey-hey! It is you! My God, I haven’t seen you in ages!”

The moment warped, mental feelers searching for a bearing. Then: recognition. He knew this girl.

“Lisa?” he queried. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, but the crush had never progressed past distanced longing. Her odd haircut and glossy blue-vinyl overcoat made her look like some kind of pop baroness. It dizzied him to see her in such contrast—in school she’d always dressed like a minister’s daughter.

“Lisa,” he finally managed. “The last time I saw you was in—”

“High school,” she finished. “I know, I know. Ten years.”

Smith groped for some cordiality, but before he could speak she was yanking him through the throng by the arm. The meeting had transpired so quickly, Smith was flabbergasted. He couldn’t stop wondering what Lisa, of all people, was doing in this seamy place.

She led him to a table marked RESERVED, then ordered two beers from a mohawked blonde with glittered nipples and an orange G-string. When Lisa looked at him she seemed to smile through a wan aura. Smith felt hit in the face by a flying stone; it was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.

“Surprised to see me?” she asked.

“I, uh,” he replied. He shook his head. “You look as good as you did in ’83.”

“Do I really?”

“Well, no. Actually you look better.”

She leaned forward, coyly, as if to tell a secret. A subtle scent drifted up, clean hair and a hint of perfume that Smith found intensely arousing. “You know, this is really freaky,” she enthused. “But I was poking around my basement today, and I found one of my old yearbooks. I opened it up and the first face I saw was yours. And here you are, a couple of hours later, sitting right in front of me.”

“A classic example of the power of the feminine mystique,” Smith joked. It might make a good social allegory. “Come to think of it, I did trudge here in a zombie-like state, beckoned by your psychic call.” He grinned stupidly, lit a cigarette. “I still can’t believe it’s you.”

Her big brown eyes beseeched him over a beautiful smile. She paused dreamily. “There’s so much I remember all of a sudden…”

“Like what?”

“Like how you used to look at me. Follow me around. Think of the silliest questions just for an excuse to talk to me…”

Smith turned red.

She touched his hand, laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassing you.”

You’re goddamned right you are, Smith thought. But then, weirdest of all, he replied, “I remember, too.”

The waitress brought the beers, and stooped to converse with Lisa. Smith used the distraction to take a good look. A black velvet choker with a tiny silver penis at its center girded her throat. Her hair hung perfectly cropped in a straight line, cut at the same level as the choker; it was lank and shiny as black silk. Bar light and shadows diced her face into a puzzle of hard, pretty angles. Her eyes were so big and bright they dominated her face almost surrealistically.

Smith’s hands tremored. He drained half his beer in one hit. Perhaps here was some of the very truth he felt bereft of. This was more than a girl—this was his past coming back to him, a reclamation. But what had his past been? Innocence? Smith frowned. Not innocence as much as intimidation and failure. He couldn’t see between the lines. Was this his past coming back? Or his weakness?

The waitress ignored him and sauntered away when he pulled out his wallet. “These are on the house,” Lisa told him. “In case you haven’t guessed, I work here.”

Smith had already figured as much. “What, waitressing?”

“Something like that.”

Probably a hostess or manager or something. Smith didn’t push it. For the next twenty minutes they talked, chatted to no account about innocuous things. She didn’t seem the least impressed that he was making a living as a writer.

It caught him off guard, however, when she observed, “But you’re not happy with your writing. You’re not fulfilled.”

She knows how to hit the nail on the head, Smith thought. Could he be read this easily? Or had his despair merely steepened to the point that it now showed? God knew he’d seen it happen to other writers. “I have this absurd and completely egotistical compulsion about…I don’t know. About the truth of things.”

“We all have our compulsions,” she remarked. She was looking right at him, smiling bright. “Nietzsche said there is no truth, right? And Sartre said it’s only in yourself. But I think they were both wrong. Truth is all over the place. You just have to know what door to look behind, or what face.”

Smith was bewildered; he could’ve laughed. I’m sitting in a strip joint with a girl I haven’t seen in ten years, talking about epistemology and abstract existential dynamics. Happens every day. He wanted to comment. He wanted to make some sophisticated, highly intellectual observation, but it all felt suddenly sucked out of his head. He could not assess a collision of opposites so diverse. The charm, the silver penis, dangled at her throat like a finger waving. He could think of no reply. When he looked back at her, he realized the only obvious truth: She was beautiful.

Then, oddly, she continued, “But even truth has a price.”

Change the subject! his thoughts commanded. Say something, you ass! Anything! “We used to come here every now and then in college. You know, have a few beers, take a look at the…speculative dancers.”

“Boys will be boys,” she returned. “Don’t be timid in admitting that you’ve been here. Christ, I work here.”

“When did they start this live sex stuff?”

“About a year ago. Washington’s always been one step behind New York and L.A. It’s a free country, right? Besides, every night is packed.”

Smith barely heard her. Her face seemed as puzzling as the night, an inexplicable perfection. A decade ago he’d dreamed of it, but what now? Where was the truth of it now?

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“Everyone is. If you look close enough.”

He was shivering. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Sitting with her, talking to her and merely seeing her was like trying to decode a cipher. Her smile never wavered. She squeezed his hand. “I would’ve gone out with you, you know, in school.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The smile turned sad. “But you never asked.”

The whole thing was too depressing. Smith knew he should leave, get out, go somewhere else for his sorry plight. But then the aura popped. The Anvil’s din rose to a wild roar. Some huge young man had stepped onto the stage, grinning and taking bows as the audience whooped. The guy looked like a body builder, all shining skin and corded, flexing muscles. He probably weighed 220 without an ounce of fat. He was completely naked but for a studded black-leather collar and wrist bands. That and the mustache and shoulder-length hair gave him the appearance of a barbarian. But Smith could only gawk at what everyone else in the place was surely gawking at. The guy’s penis, though limp, was huge. It dangled between his legs like a flap of steak.

“Excess is the name of the game at The Anvil,” Lisa commented. “How’s that for a donkey-rig?”

Smith gulped. He’d never felt right talking to girls about sexual details, much less penises of extraordinary size, but even he had to half-chuckle. “It looks like something that should hang in a smokehouse. I hope his partner has a good health plan.”

“His name’s Do-Horse. A real scream. We didn’t hesitate to hire him once he showed us his qualifications.”

Smith had always believed that morality was relative. He was not a Christian, yet he knew travesty when he saw it. He stared at Do-Horse. The dense, pumped-up muscles and brash grin made him not a man but a caricature, a personification of moral desertion.

Lisa let out a long, uneasy sigh. “You always were a gentleman. Aren’t you going to ask me what I do here? Aren’t you even wondering?”

“I’m wondering,” Smith admitted, spewing smoke.

“Pay attention and you’ll see.”

With Smith’s low groan came images of beauty defiled, like dropping fresh-picked flowers into pits of excrement, like pissing into spring water. The applause grew deafening as Lisa wended toward the stage. She stepped up and shed the plastic overcoat; her sudden nudity glowed in the stage light. She turned and bowed, raised her arms, giving the crowd its visual appetizer. She was a caricature herself—of desire unbridled, a living object of men’s lust. Her body was long, willowy, very slender, but with large, high breasts and sharp contours. Her hips turned to highlight her pubis, which was hairless and smooth, a protuberant cleft. Do-Horse strode the stage a last time, flexing softball-sized biceps and tensing the rippled musculature of his back. Then he sat spread-legged in the chair. Lisa knelt at once and took hold of his cock. It drooped like a fat, lazy snake.

Smith felt paralyzed, hands flat on the table, eyelids glued open. This was awful, a passion play from the abyss. Do-Horse had come erect instantly. The glans, large as a baby apple, seemed to pop into Lisa’s mouth. She blew him in long, suffocating strokes, while applause surged like machine gun fire.

The thing must’ve been a foot long, and Smith actually jolted when every inch of it slid quickly down her throat. “Deep throat, my ass!” someone shouted. “This is deep stomach!” Smith thought he saw hunger in her bulged eyes. Her cheeks looked stuffed, her stretched-open jaw made her face long and narrow. My God, Smith thought. My God, my God.

Do-Horse lifted her up, pulled her mouth off. Her ass spread against the leather strap when he placed her in the harness. Long slim legs hung loose; she looked levitated as she grasped the suspending cord. Do-Horse knelt to plow her sex with his tongue, which, like the rest of him, seemed inordinately large. The hot lights beat down; sweat shone on her flesh like lacquer. All the while, Lisa squirmed in the harness, her feet pedaling the course of this oral prelude. When Do-Horse stood up, the shadow of his erection played over her belly, a ghost-serpent ranging white valleys. Lisa reached up and caressed the equally large testicles, then began to stroke the shaft. In time, she guided the dome to her sex. The dome disappeared. Do-Horse grinned, paused, then shoved it all into her at once.

A hush swept over the crowd. Lisa shuddered at the first thrusts, then slipped into the rhythm, more and more intent. That’s all Smith could see in her now, an intricacy of intentness, matrixes crossing—flesh and spirit. The clarity of details revolted him, the shine of sweat on skin, the motion of muscles, the moaning and the wet sounds in sudden pin-drop silence. It hurt just to watch. The girth of the penis stretched Lisa’s sex to a tight, bright-pink rim. With each thrust, Smith feared it might break.

Do-Horse was an iceman, his grin false, his arousal automatic and cold as slate. His ministrations progressed with no more passion than a derrick wheel pounding dirt. Yet Lisa reacted the opposite. Again it was her intentness, like light focused to diamond-points. Her nipples stood up stiff and pink. Her shiny breasts quivered with the blows. She moaned and whipped her head around and locked her ankles behind the broad, tapered back.

Perhaps intentness was contagious. The once cacophonous crowd had transposed to a room full of frozen, staring faces and unblinking eyes. Every attention held fast, in compounded silence, to the lighted stage. Smith felt himself shivering. Was this truth, this one-act play of copulation as spectator sport? These were human bodies submitted for mutual use, the act of love corrupted to parody. Or perhaps it was Smith’s misconceptions. Besides, every night is packed, Lisa had told him. Maybe Smith’s ideals had kept unadmitted attractions buried to his consciousness. If not, then why hadn’t he left? It was the same sensation he’d felt upon entering, a melting pot of revulsion and excitement. Everything was opposites here, negative poles being forced to touch.

Lisa seemed close to convulsions when Do-Horse took her out of the harness. He lay her on the floor and straddled her, sat right down on her belly. The wet penis pointed up, pulsing. Lisa looked at it as though it were more than a cock, as if it were an icon of vast complexity, the graven image of the cult of flesh. She grabbed it with both hands, stroked back and forth first slowly, then with vigor. Do-Horse’s grin looked like a knife-cut in clay. His buttocks constricted as his climax broke. The long spurts of his semen jumped out in flying lines which formed chaotic glyphs in the air, arcane messages or even epitaphs. They landed on Lisa’s breasts and face as she milked out the last. The finishing touch surprised no one; Do-Horse leaned over and licked it all off.

In the aftermath, a great empty space filled Smith’s gut. The crowd was roaring again, standing in demented ovation. Amid the rain of applause, Lisa and Do-Horse rose, their naked bodies gleaming under the lights. They stepped to the stage edge, exchanged grins, and bowed to the audience.

The act was over. Smoking, drinking, oblivious, Smith felt consigned to stare back into his own thoughts. Other acts followed, variations of the same crossed matrixes of flesh and bipolarity. More bodies for use. More sex as spectacle. The Anvil thundered after each performance, while Smith’s despair sunk to the lowest strata. Sometime later, a shadow listed behind him. He was stupefied and drunk. Only the trace scents of clean hair and soap caused him to look up. Purity in the Hall of Filth, he thought. Everything is opposites.

“Oh, Jesus,” came the sad voice. “You look so innocent sitting there.” Lisa was dressed again in the shiny new wave coat. The tiny silver penis dangled on the choker. “Shocked?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“People change. Changing is an unchanging fact. I’m not ashamed of what I do.”

“I don’t expect you to be.”

Her words rose like an incantation, very far away. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. But in the meantime…” She slipped him a piece of paper.

“Here’s my address.”

Smith thought about her for days. He drank his meals and chain smoked, trying to refit the pieces of his psyche. He saw her in nagging images, he saw her in his dreams: the montage of flesh and throbbing lights, how her skin shined in sweat, how her eyes rolled back in her head as she was penetrated.

His manuscripts were waste to him now, all dissolution. He burned them in the fireplace and watched the flames. What did he expect to see? Revelation? Truth? All he saw was her, and the only thing even close to his concept of truth gazed back at him night after night from the blank page in his typewriter.

Knowing that he must not go to her only made him want to more. He felt buried alive in a grave of abstractions. Somehow, she was the key, she was the answer to the question, and Smith knew this without even knowing what the question was.

It was a cold night, and very quiet. He saw things in rhythms and weave works of textures. Colors hummed, unreal yet painfully intense. Streetlights burned like pots of phosphorus in a darkness of steeped dimensions and hidden heights. Before he knew it, numb from the wind, he was trudging up the steps of the stark row house, was knocking emptily on the door.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

The sound of her voice made Smith want to wilt, or even cry. Inside was warm as a womb; she brought him in and closed out the cold. A long, dark hall led to a room laved in twilight. There was only a bed and bare walls. Behind them, a narrow window framed the moon.

Neither of them spoke; words seemed a pointless objectivity. Smith’s heart thudded when she wriggled out of her jeans. The blouse slid off her shoulders like dark liquid. Moonlight etched her contours in tinsel, pools of shadow, luminous swirls of flesh.

She stripped him systematically, appraising him in circles. When she knelt, he felt tremendous embarrassment, but what man wouldn’t, knowing what she was used to? “It’s not big, it’s not like Do-Horse,” he muttered, a dreary excuse.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

The touch of her lips on his penis made him feel speared by current. He came in her mouth almost spontaneously, which made him feel even less adequate. He was mad to have come here, idiotic to think he could pass for the man she needed him to be. He shivered as he limpened; his knees almost gave. “Jesus, I’m…” But she was smiling, already leading him to the bed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We have lots of time, don’t we?”

Time, Smith thought. Somewhere, a clock was ticking. Who even knew what time was?

She gradually caressed out his fears, kissed away his inadequacies. The warm bed felt like clouds. Mere seconds revived his erection; her hands on his skin, like catalytic prods, gave him life. Suddenly he felt powerful; he felt ready. What could constitute so rapid a resurgence of vitality? Their mouths bathed every inch of the others’ flesh, tongues wringing pleasure out of nerves. She tasted lovely and sharp. Her fluids sheened his mouth and ran down his neck. Her jerking orgasms made him feel brighter than the sun.

Eventually his cock found her sex. They coupled in every conceivable configuration, and in some, perhaps, not conceivable. Passion or lust—it didn’t matter because it was real either way, shreds of truth seeping into his mind through her body heat, her sweat and her musk and her kisses. That same intent—his own quest, perhaps—incited him. Was he giving to her, or was she taking? The question seemed meaningless; truth was not a question, and truth was all it was he’d ever been looking for. Truth, he thought. But what had she said? He came in her repeatedly, ignoring exhaustion. The channel of her sex seemed to gulp each release of his semen, seemed to rejoice over it as a gift, as though he were indeed giving something of himself.

But what had she said, earlier at the club?

They made love and they fucked—all night. The moon watched them over their backs. Their sweat drenched the bed, along with her own fluids, and his that ran out of her. When there was nothing left, absolutely nothing, Smith rolled over, gasping air. Traced in moonlight and sated, she leaned up, very gently stroking his chest and shriveled penis, cupping the spent testicles. Truth, he thought yet again. Then he remembered what she’d said: But even truth has a price…Smith gazed at her now.

Then he screamed.

The hand playing over his penis was now no more than gray-white skin stretched taut over bone. Her eyes looked sightless, huge, like crystals. Her features blurred and prolapsed. A stench rose. Her face drew out to a long, thin shape, her cheeks sucking in, her nose receding to a pair of skeletal holes. Smith was in bed with a corpse.

“Truths change,” grated the dead voice.

Smith could not speak, could not break the paresis.

The corpse smiled. “I’m your truth. The new truth.”

Smith convulsed, in waves. Even truth has a price.

“Pay me,” it said.

I work at The Anvil now, with Lisa and Do-Horse and all the rest. We are the oligarchs of a new order, not remnants of eons past but seeds of a new truth. We are the prize and the penalty, what is wanted and what can never be had. Others rise, wither, and die unnoticed, but we go on forever, changing only faces with changing times. We slake our lust on the passion—and the truth—of the world.

Stop in and see us sometime.

MAKE A WISH

“Look,” Jessy said. “A falling star.”

Why did her gaze upward seem so hopeful? In Seattle, the stars always looked farther away than they had in Baltimore; Spad said it was because they were closer to the North Pole. At first, she could barely make it out: a tiny fleck of light that streaked across the midnight sky over Elliot Bay. “Can you see it?” she asked.

Spad managed a smile. “Make a wish. But you have to make it quick, before the star burns out.”

But Jessy didn’t believe in wishes. Why should she?

The twenty-dollar bags of “boy” were long gone. Skag was cheaper here—lumps of sticky black tar from Mexico. They sold it in “quarters” for quarter grams, and it was only ten bucks a bang. It was also much more potent. Even with the resistance she’d built up, in Seattle she could get by on six a day, even four. Everything she’d heard in the Baltimore County lockup had turned out to be true…at least with regard to heroin. On the West Coast, it was better, stronger, cheaper, and easier to cop. The needle exchanges were legit: no questions asked. Supply never turned dry. But then there were the things they hadn’t mentioned. You abscessed with each and every shot. The stuff stayed black when you strained it; it was like injecting dirt into yourself, and you had to muscle half your hits because your blood coagulated faster. Your whole body scabbed up after a while, and it was ten times harder to turn tricks in this town. Jessy’d always figured you had to take the good with the bad anywhere in life, but here the bad snuck up on you and then put you down like a brick fell off the top floor of the Seafirst Building and landed on your head. Every day when she woke up to cop, she wished she was dead. Being dead seemed so much easier. Out here junkies and crackheads jumped off the Aurora bridge two a week. No one had survived yet.

But she couldn’t do that now. She was pregnant.

“Jessy’s got herself a little smack-baby comin’,” Leon had told her the other day when he’d gotten out of jail. She was starting to show, her 95-pound frame sporting a tight shiny pot belly. “If this one lives,” Leon had said, “give it to me. I know people who buy babies. They won’t know it’s all fucked up till later. It ain’t really a kid, Jess. It’s a junk-baby, it’s like takin’ a shit. Come on, I’ll give ya twenty bucks for it.” Fuck you, she thought. Leon had been her pimp when she’d first arrived three years ago. He’d been smiling down at her when she’d stepped off the 194 bus; he knew. But he’d kicked her out of the crib after only a few months, and knocked several teeth out as a going-away present. “You’re a waste’a my time, bitch. That shit’s uglied you up so bad, you scare all rummies out’a Piss Park.” But she’d been pregnant before—three times—and she’d always miscarried. It was either the skag or malnutrition, or both.

She’d worked her way down fast. Never “pretty” to begin with, her face was slightly elongated and eyes too far apart—the fetal alcohol syndrome was all that she’d ever inherit from her mother—and now the black skag just made it worse. The scabs flecked her face like a leprosy. Makeup wouldn’t cover them, and if she picked them off, they’d just bleed for hours and re-form larger. On some occasions, though, she’d get lucky, when johns picked her up on Jackson Street too drunk to notice what she looked like, but mostly she’d been relegated to the bum bars, the bottom of the trick barrel. They didn’t care. The downside was they always spent their SSI money within a week of the first of the month, then it was gone. Grueling blow jobs behind bus stops, between dumpsters, in urine-drenched alleys. At least in Baltimore she’d had steady tricks.

Each day progressed like slow drool. Perpetually constipated, dizzy from low blood sugar, half-paralyzed from initial withdrawal. She felt weightless, a husk in dirty jeans and flip-flops. Her zombie-like trek led her through downtown’s bowels while she pleaded to a god she didn’t believe in for just one scumbag to blow for twenty dollars. Unless you could prove state residency, the rehabs would back-burner you. Three to six months. How can we reach you when a slot opens? Oh, just give me a call; I live under the trolley bridge at Fourth and Jackson. Bridge-surfing was easier; to get a bed at a shelter you either had to camp out (in which case the cops rousted you) or bribe a counselor. Instead of leaving the King Dome up to at least keep the homeless out of the rain, they’d demolitioned it for a new stadium they couldn’t possibly pay for, and the latest “beautify downtown” plan closed two more shelters.

Fuck it. She’d wash in Lake Union and sleep under bridges.

Dumpster-diving kept her fed and pan-handling could generally cover a couple of bangs a day—then it was on to the bars and the alleys. Surprisingly, none of her four pregnancies had been from johns. Even before the eruption of black-tar scabs, ninety-nine percent of her tricks were just quick blow jobs in cars. Instead, her pregnancies had resulted from a multitude of rapes. At night, the animals assumed their turf. Between the psychotic bums in Piss Park and the gangs north of Ninth street, Jessy was mere sexual meat whenever her addiction forced her across these lines. She’d nearly been killed once by several members of some gang called the Kay-Mob. “Never seed me a ho THAT ugly!” she’d heard. They were about to crack her head open with a two-by-four after an hour-long train behind the Aristocrat. “Bust the bitch’s coconut!” But they’d fled when a car pulled into the lot. Jessy had seen in the headlights that none of them could’ve been older than fifteen.

She could never understand it. Even in all her hardship, and in all the appalling things she’d witnessed, she could never understand how people could be so monstrous, so absolutely evil.

Each miscarriage felt like a disembowelment, and they’d come with the quickness of rifle shots. There was nothing she could do but leave them there and run away shrieking into rainy darkness. Killing herself seemed mouth watering, like a box of bonbons being viewed by a fat boy through the candy-store window. But the skag would never let her. It was always “I’ll just cop one more time, then do it,” but she knew that that one more time would last forever.

Not caring was her only source of vengeance. The Red Chinese spies stealing military secrets? Forty-car collision on I-5 kills twelve? Wild fires in the Midwest scorch 100,000 acres and leave hundreds homeless? So what? The world didn’t care about her. Why should she care about the world?

Spad seemed to care, though.

She’d met him a year ago. She’d tried to steal a flower from the market—one of those phony red-satin roses. The security guards had chased her all the way down the Pike’s Market Hillclimb and across the train tracks before they’d given up. A few minutes later, though, Spad appeared in a dingy pea-coat with a TeleTtubbie e on the sleeve. “After all that, you definitely deserve these,” he said, and gave her a handful of the phony roses.

He was just like her in a way: looking for something when there was nothing left to look for—only he hadn’t given up. He was slim and handsome, and didn’t abscess nearly as badly as most. He taught her to always use the surplus insulin syringes from the exchange; they hurt more but you could always sense the vein more precisely. Spad was smart. He was interested in things, and this fascinated her. Every day he’d jimmy open a paper box and read the Times, but he’d always put it back when he was done. He even believed in God. “We’re all spirits, Jessy,” he told her once. “We’re immortal. When we die, God saves us.”

“Well why doesn’t He fucking save us now?” she argued back. “How could God put us in a shitty world like this?”

“God didn’t make the world shitty, we did. But don’t worry. He’ll forgive us.”

For some reason, this sounded hopeful to her, or perhaps she was just impressed by his ability to hope at all.

Spad got a lot more tricks than she did, but he always shared the money with her. Once he’d ripped off a john just so he could rent them a room for one night at the Bush; it was her birthday. The lumpy bed felt like heaven. He taught her how to have fun. During the WTO riots, they gleefully tore through the crowds and picked protestors’ pockets. They’d moon police from the Jackson overpass and steal pizzas from the Pagliacci’s on Stone Way because they always left the back door open. They’d hang on to the back rails of the waterfront street car and laugh in the breeze. Even in their mutual curse, Spad taught her to laugh.

Then he began to die.

Of course, in a sense, they both were, and they knew it, but Spad’s AIDS made the notion much more immediate. The sarcoma on his back and the backs of his legs told them all they needed to know. “It’s not that big a deal,” he’d said earlier on, smiling. “My only worry is how are you going to steal pizzas without me?” Jessy’s grief bottled her up; she didn’t know how to deal with all those black emotions at once. She’d never cry in front of him—that would make him feel dead already. Soon it was up to her to cop for both of them, and she didn’t do very well. At least in the summer she could make more panhandling from the tourists, but it was nearly impossible to leave him. Her worst fear was that she’d come back to the bridge with a couple quarter grams and he’d be dead. She’d be alone. What would she do then? She supposed she could kill herself by his side, but what of the baby? No, she couldn’t do that. Nothing was fair, ever.

Meanwhile, he got sicker and sicker, to the point that he could barely move most of the time. On a good day, though—like today—he managed to walk with her down to the waterfront. She panhandled all day in front of Red Robin while he slept beneath the abutments of the public pier. She made over forty dollars, then she went back to him…

“Did you make your wish?” he asked. He looked like a skeleton in rotten clothes, and he’d been coughing up more blood. Somehow, though, he seemed at ease.

“No such thing as wishes.”

“Of course there is. You made forty dollars today.”

“I didn’t wish for it. It just happened.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes!” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s, bitchy, argumentative. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. So she looked up at the sky.

The falling star was still there, a streaking white fleck over the mountains beyond the Sound. There was a naval post over there, in Bremerton, and she’d always heard it was a good place to turn tricks. Other girls would tell her that if you hitchhiked the main drag after midnight, the servicemen would pick you up in a heartbeat. A girl could turn ten tricks in a few hours. Unfortunately, Jessy could never afford the ferry ride to get over there.

More bad luck.

“I have to go cop,” she said. “I’ll be back in a while.”

More coughing, more blood. His nearly dead hand squeezed hers. “Make a wish first, just for fun.”

Irritation was the only thing that could mask her sadness. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to wish for,” she spat. “An earthquake, right here. Split the Sound right open and suck everything down, the whole shitty city, all the people, everything. Fuck ’em.”

“That’s too hateful,” he remarked. “You’re not hateful. Make a real wish.”

She wished they were dead. Her, Spad, the baby, all together. Painless. No more scabs, no more tricks, no more bridges. That’s what she wished for. “There. I’ve made it.”

“So…what’s your wish?”

“You’re not supposed to tell!” she objected, “Or it won’t come true.” Again, she wanted to look at him but couldn’t. She wanted to kiss him. Couldn’t.

She just kept looking at the sky, at the star. Two more appeared. Maybe this would be a meteor shower, like the ones she’d seen over the Chesapeake so long ago.

Finally, she asked him, “Did you make your wish?”

Spad didn’t answer. His hand lay limp in hers; he was dead.

She refused to look at him. She should just get up and walk away and not look, because she didn’t want to remember him that way. Looking would hurt too much, and she was sick of hurting. Silent tears shined on her cheeks. She felt short of breath, ripped off yet again by God or the universe or whatever.

The falling stars—three of them now—seemed to slow down. She didn’t understand at first; usually falling stars disappeared in a wink, but these were arcing over the Sound in long glittery white streaks.

Jessy would have no reason to know what a MIRV was, or an air-burst proximity warhead. It occurred to her, though—in another second—that these weren’t really falling stars. She gripped Spad’s hand tighter. She had enough time to smile and feel warm. Then the sky turned white and her wish came true.

MAKAK

Casparza was repulsive—a human blob. He couldn’t pack the food into his fat face fast enough. Look at him, Hull thought, disgusted. Just another greasy spic blimp.

But the girl—she was beautiful, and all class. She’d said her name was Janice. Too old to be squeeze, Hull decided. Mid or late-twenties. He’d heard all the stories; the fat man was a short-eyes, a kiddie-diddler—anything over 15 was over the hill. So how did Janice figure into it? She looked like a typical American businesswoman. Come to think of it, Hull had seen lots of Americans milling about the plush villa. What were so many Americans doing here? This was Peru.

And the black guy? Hull had noticed him at once. Weird. The guy was just standing there off by some trees. What is this? Some voodoo fucking freak show? Hull thought. The guy had dreadlocks past his shoulders, and he was wearing some dashiki-looking thing with something hanging off the sash. Hull had never seen a black man so black. Like anthracite. And the guy hadn’t moved. He just stared at them from afar, blank-faced.

“So, Mr. Hull,” Casparza bid. “This is most irregular. We rarely deal direct, especially small-timers. But I know some of your people. They say good of you.”

That’s nice to hear, you fat shit.

Casparza weighed 400 pounds plus. The grinning face scarcely appeared human—comic features pressed into dough. He wore a preposterous white straw hat, and pants and a shirt that could tarp a baby elephant.

“The goddamn DEA interdictions are killing us,” Hull informed him.

“They’re killing the major cartels too,” Janice pointed out. Her voice seemed reserved, hushed. Perhaps she was Casparza’s spokeswoman. She had straight, pretty, ash blonde hair and wore a rather conservative beige business dress. A tiny pendant hung about her neck, but Hull couldn’t make it out. She primly held a lit cigarette, though he had yet to see her take a drag. She hadn’t eaten, either. The servants had brought food only to Hull and Casparza: some brown mush called aji, a stinky napalm-hot fish stew, and slabs of something the fat man had merely referred to as “Meatroll! My favoreet!” Dessert had been anticoucho collops of fried sheep heart on sticks.

Hull hadn’t eaten much.

“And now my amigo would like to buy from me,” Casparza went on. His accent hung thick as the rolls of flab descending his chest.

“That’s right, Mr. Casparza. Our middlemen are getting blanked out. The Bolivians can’t be trusted, and the Colombians are losing eighty percent of their orders to seizures. My whole region is going nuts.”

Which was an understatement. Peru had been the number three producer; now it was number one. After the hostage thing, the Tactical Air Command had clobbered the Colombian strongholds and Agent Oranged a hundred thousand acres of their best coca fields, and now there was talk of dropping a light infantry division into Bolivia. This was bad for business; Hull had money to make and customers to please. He needed ten keys a month to keep his region happy, but now he was lucky to see two. The fucking feds were ruining everything. He’d had no choice but to come to see Casparza in person. The fat man had a secret.

“You guarantee delivery,” Hull said. “Nobody else does that. You’ve become a bit of a legend in the States. Word is you haven’t lost a single drop to the feds.”

“This is true, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s huge black-hole mouth opened wide and sucked a piece of sheep heart off a skewer. It crunched like nuts when he chewed. “But my production surplus is no very good.”

“The influx of orders is maxing us out,” Janice coolly added.

“I understand that.” Hull trained his attentions on Casparza, though the girl’s straitlaced beauty nagged at him. At first he thought the pendant around her neck was a locket; closer peripheral inspection showed him a tiny bag of something, or a tied pouch. She’s probably some whacked out New Ager from California, Hull snidely considered. He hated California. It’s probably a pouch full of crystal dust or some shit, to purify her fucking aura. But of course that didn’t mesh with the rest of her looks—primo, neat as a pin. And there was something about her eyes—just…something. “We’re a small operation, Mr. Casparza. I only want to buy ten keys a month.”

“You know my price?”

“Yes,” Hull said. Goddamn right he did. The drug war had jacked prices through the roof. A year ago a kilo of “product” ran for 13.5 a key. Now they wanted 25. Casparza charged 30 and he got it. Nobody knew how he evaded seizure losses, and nobody cared. They just wanted the fat man’s shit. Even at 30 K per drop the profit margin remained huge considering street value and higher pocket prices. But Casparza was a millionaire. He needed Hull’s penny-ante business like he needed another helping of meatroll.

“I can pay thirty-five a key,” Hull finally said. The offer would be taken either as a compliment or a grievous insult. Hull knocked on the table leg.

“Hmmm,” Casparza remarked. “Let me think. I think better when I eat.”

You must think a lot, ya tub of shit.

Sunlight dappled the huge table through plush trees. Hull could smell the fresh scents of the jungle. He looked at Janice again. Yes, it was a tiny pouch at the end of her necklace. She smiled meekly, but her eyes did not match.

“You remind me of home,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

She didn’t reply. Her eyes seemed to beseech him, yet her face remained composed. Hull thought he could guess her story; a lot of the cartel honchos paid big bucks for white girls. Was that what her eyes were saying? Her eyes, Hull thought. They looked sad, barely extant.

Casparza shoveled more fried meat into his face, then chugged down a third tumbler of yarch, which smelled liked sewer water but didn’t taste half bad. Hull craned around; the black guy in the dashiki was still standing off by the trees. He couldn’t be a bodyguard; he was a stick. Besides, Casparza had more guns than the White House. The black guy hadn’t moved in an hour.

“Who’s the shadow?” Hull eventually asked.

“Raka,” Casparza grunted, cheeks stuffed.

“Mr. Casparza’s spiritual advisor,” Janice augmented. Spiritual advisor, my cock, Hull thought. He didn’t believe in spirit. He believed in the body and what the body demanded of the lost. He believed in the simple objectivities of supply and demand. Spirit could go fuck itself. Spirit was bad for business.

“Raka is from Africa, the Shaniki province.” Casparza wiped his fat fingers on the tablecloth. “He helps me. He is my guiding light.”

You need a guiding light, dumbo. You’re so fat you block out the sun.

Hull squinted. The black unresponsive face stared back unblinking. Was he staring at Hull, or through him? The braided dreadlocks dangled like whipcords. Hull still couldn’t identify the thing that hung off Raka’s sash.

Casparza chuckled, jowls jiggling. “You are wondering how I do it, yes? You are wondering how it is that I lose no product while everyone else loses their ass.”

Sure, blubberhead. I’m wondering. “That’s your affair, Mr. Casparza. I’m just a businessman trying to stay afloat.”

Casparza’s grin drew seams into his immense face. “Truth is power, and spirit is truth. Think about that, amigo. Think hard.”

Hull knew shit when he smelled it. Were they playing with him? The black guy watching his back and Casparza’s grinning, porky face in front was about all Hull’s nerves could stand. But just as he became convinced that this whole thing was a mistake, Casparza stood up, his shadow engulfing the table. He offered his fat hand.

“We have a deal, Mr. Hull. Ten keys a month at thirty-five a key.”

Hull jumped up. He shook the fat man’s hand, suppressing the abrupt gust of relief. “I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Casparza. It’s an honor to do business with you.”

“Just remember what I said”—the fat grin beamed—“about spirit.”

Hull could think of no response.

Casparza laughed. His eyeballs looked like marbles sunk in fat. “We make arrangements in the morning. Until then, make yourself at home.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Janice will show you around.”

The fat man lumbered off. He’d been sitting on a packing crate—Hull noticed now—since no chair on earth could accommodate his girth. Rolls of fat hung off his sides and wriggled like Jell-O.

“Ready for the twenty-five-cent tour?” Janice inquired.

“Sure,” Hull said. He was elated. He’d done it; he’d made his deal. But impulse dragged at his gaze. Hull turned his head in tingling slowness.

Raka, the black shadow, was gone.

“You’re either very stupid or very desperate,” Janice said. She led him past the pool. Several girls—blondes—frolicked nude in the water, while a few more lay back in lounge chairs, taking turns freebasing. None of them could have been older than sixteen.

“I’m probably a little bit of both,” Hull answered her. “But what makes you think so?”

Janice lit a cigarette. “You’ve got balls coming down here. Alone. An independent with a small order.”

Hearing this prim and proper woman say balls was oddly erotic. “I’ve got a business to run,” Hull pointed out. “A direct deal was my last resort. You wouldn’t believe what the States are like since the crackdown. I hate to think how many times I’ve driven around all night with a suitcase full of hundreds and no one to give it to. But your boss guarantees delivery. I had to give it a shot.”

Now the girls who’d been freebasing lay back in grinning stupors. Two more climbed out of the pool for their turns, one so young she scarcely had pubic hair. Hull did not feel even abstractly responsible. Loss was always someone else’s gain. Why shouldn’t he be in on it? He was just a purveyor to a need. Supply and demand, kids. It’s not my fault the world’s a piece of shit. If I don’t sell it, somebody else will.

One of the blondes smiled at him, her white legs spread unabashed on the lounge chair. A blow job maybe, but there was no way Hull would want to fuck any of the pool girls. Too young; kids weren’t his style. See? he thought, a comical testament to God. I’ve got morals. A drug marketeer, Hull was no stranger to lots of sex; he liked nothing more than breaking a couple of nuts per day into a nice, hot box. But seasoned women were more his bag. Women with experience. Women who knew themselves, and were sure of themselves. Like—

Well, like his escort, for instance.

He tried to catch glimpses of Janice as she led him out of the court. Great figure, great legs. Not age but more like a refinement had crept into her model’s face, tightening the mouth, etching tiny lines at the corners of the eyes. Her eyes, he contemplated again. They were probably once very beautiful. Now they looked lackluster. How long ago had she been one of the girls in the pool? Her eyes showed all the broken pieces of her dreams, but Hull didn’t feel particularly guilty about that either. Why should he? He wouldn’t mind fucking her, though—no, indeed. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Humping a good one off up her slot. He could imagine it in his mind: wet and ready, and a gorgeous dark-blonde thatch. Then maybe he’d turn her around and treat her to a second load up the backdoor. Hmmm. A nice thought, at least. He was probably even entitled to it now that he was Casparza’s client.

But what the hell was that goddamn little thing around her neck?

She took him down the hill. As before, she ignored the lit cigarette in her hand. “Here’re the works,” she said.

Casparza ran an impressive operation. This was no cokehole in the jungle; it was a complex. Whole warehouses were devoted to maturation and wash-trenches. Dump trucks one after another roared down from the fields, their beds stacked high with coca leaves. Processors in more warehouses treated and pulped the leaves to new paste. Further treatment and desiccation reduced the paste to purified powder, which would then be distilled to crack once it got to the point people in the States.

Then they passed the camp.

At first Hull thought it must be where the field laborers slept. Rows of camouflaged tents lined the field. In the middle of it all stood a single, much larger tent.

Hull spied several men in business suits walking down the tent rows. They were Americans, obviously.

“What’s with all the Americans here?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Janice told him.

A pair of bent laborers dragged big plastic garbage cans out of the central tent. They disappeared around the side. Standing at the tent’s posted entrance was Raka, the black.

“Okay, what’s with him, then? What’s Raka’s story?”

“You ask too many questions, Mr. Hull.”

I guess I’ll take that as a hint. Hull felt entrenched by the sudden weirdness. Americans in business suits? Some black stone-face in a mojo costume? This was a coke factory in the middle of Peru. But the girl was right; he mustn’t make waves. Don’t look a gift blimp in the mouth. As long as Hull got his order, Casparza could have his mystery. He could have his truth and his power and his spirit.

The tour was over. Evening came early here; the jungle darkened in dusk. “I’m impressed,” Hull admitted.

“You should be.”

Hull kept looking at the camp. More men in suits filed out of the big tent. He saw women, too, dressed like Janice. All clearly Americans.

“Don’t worry about it,” Janice repeated. It sounded like a warning. “The world is more diverse than we think, Mr. Hull. It’s really not a world at all, but a whole bunch of worlds.”

“Meaning?”

“This—this place here—is not your world.”

Hull stared at her.

“Just remember what Casparza said, Mr. Hull. Remember it well.”

Her cigarette had grown an inch of ash. Hull’s eyes darted from the pendant at her bust to her eyes, always back to her eyes. For a fractured moment he felt seized, or rather bound. He felt tied up by his own confusion. Her eyes, he pondered. There was something about her eyes.

Her eyes looked dead.

Janice fingered the makak; it seemed to give off heat.

But Janice felt cold.

She raised her nightgown and rubbed the jelly into her sex. K-Y, the tube read. She barely felt it. The night air steamed around her, but she barely felt that either. She did not sweat. She looked at her hand and saw the cigarette burns encrusted between her fingers.

Moonlight eddied in through the window. Hull lay asleep on the bed. Janice drifted in, still not sure what she was doing. So much was instinct now—habits that sat perched behind her life like ghosts. She envied Hull in his sleep. Real sleep, she thought.

Hull reminded her of home, whatever that was. He reminded her of life.

“Mr. Hull?” she whispered, leaning over his bed. She shook him gently. What am I doing? she wondered. Why am I here?

Hull stirred, then his eyes snapped open. “What…?” he murmured. A pause ticked like dripping wax. Then: “Janice?”

She queried him with her eyes, as if viewing not a person but a notion or an idea only partially interpretable.

“Come here,” he said.

She pulled the sheet off and lay beside him. What could she say? I’m lonely, Mr. Hull? You remind me of things? Her fingers closed around his penis. It grew stiff at once. The reaction pleased her; it made her happy: flesh coming to life at her touch. She flinched when he kissed her. His hands felt her body through the nightgown. Again, she wondered if it was the memory of being touched that registered, or the actual sensation. It was like being touched by a ghost.

“You remind me of things,” she whispered.

“What things? Tell me.”

Janice wanted to cry. Possibly she was, though tearlessly. She hitched her nightgown up and straddled him. His penis slipped right into her sex—another ghost.

He reached for the nightgown. “Take this off.”

“No!” she said too quickly.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Janice. I want to see you.”

Beautiful. Woman. See you. But she didn’t want him to see her. She instead pushed the straps off her shoulders and let the gown slide down to her waist. He began to pump slowly in and out. The makak bobbled between her breasts.

“Christ, your pussy feels good,” he panted. But even this crude remark pleased her, complimented her. My pussy feels good. It made her feel real.

“I’m gonna come so much in you…”

Come. Sperm. Fucking. Yes, you remind me of things. What, though? She could remember only in snatches. Each thrust of his penis into her sex pushed a little piece to the surface of her mind. How old had she been? Fourteen? Fifteen? Not an uncommon story. Her father had sodomized her for years. Then she’d run away only to be sodomized by worse people, but by then the drugs held the reins of her life so she didn’t really care. She’d been passed back and forth—for anything. Lots of gang bangs and bondage. Lots of fletching. Many times, her man—his name was ’Rome—brought her up for what he called the “Champagne Special.” She’d have to blow a roomful of men, spitting each ejaculation into a champagne glass; upon completion, of course, she’d then consume the contents of the glass in one gulp. Dog shows were another regular entertainment for ’Rome’s dealer friends. Some of the dogs they brought up were quite large and frisky. “Make Fido happy, Janice,” ’Rome had ordered, “or it’s no froggie for you.” The little white rocks were all the motivation she needed, her treasure at the end of the rainbow, day in, day out. Eventually she’d been sold.

And ended up here.

She’d been sold to Casparza as part of a favor. Casparza liked them young, before they got too beat. He owned many girls. He was too fat to effectively have intercourse, but he liked blowjobs and hand jobs. He’d lie on his back and hold his massive belly up as the girls took turns. He also liked tongue baths. “Ah, my little lovers,” he’d mutter while several girls slowly licked the greasy sweat off his entire lardacious carriage. Casparza didn’t wash much, which made it worse. Sometimes he’d lie on his belly, two girls holding apart his buttocks as others licked his testicles and anus. Occasionally he would defecate on a girl’s chest—a squatting human whale—and it always seemed to be poor Janice who received the privilege of eating the spicy excrement.

Once a girl got old—twenty or so—he didn’t want them anymore. Many were given to the merc camps that patrolled the fields, others simply disappeared. But the lucky ones were saved for special duties. For Raka.

Raka, she thought, riding up and down.

Hull’s rhythm steepened. “You are one hot box, Janice—Christ.” Her sex made a wet, crinkly noise, like someone eating food. The sensation of motion, of heat and impact, made Janice feel dully elated. Being penetrated—now—was a transposition of sorts, a crossing of matrixes. It put flesh on her memory, life in the space where her heart used to be.

Hull groped for her; he pulled her down, hugging her, as he ejaculated. She could feel his semen spurt into her sex. It felt warm. It was a warm gift he’d given to her, a deposit from one world to another.

She lay back beside him. His finger traced around her breast, then tapped the makak. “What’s this?”

My life, she wished she could say. “A makak—a good luck charm.”

“Superstitious, huh? I’ve seen a lot of people around here with these things. At that camp. What is that place, anyway?” When she didn’t answer, he pushed her back. “Let me go down on you. I want to eat your snatch.”

“No!” she objected.

He pulled at the nightgown rumpled about her waist.

“No!” she said, grabbing his hands. “Please don’t.”

“You don’t have anything to be self-conscious about.”

“Just…please…don’t.”

Hull let it rest. He was an attractive man, unabashed in his nakedness. He looked clean-cut and professional. He didn’t look like what he was, and she supposed that’s why Casparza liked him.

“How does he do it?” Hull asked her.

“Do what?”

“How does Casparza get his shit out? He can’t be doing it with boats; the U.S. Navy’s all over the coast. And surveillance planes are IRing the major land routes twenty-four hours a day.”

“He mules the orders.”

Hull leaned up, astonished. “What, commercial air flights?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. Customs checks every plane inside and out, and they fluoroscope and sniff every single piece of luggage and hand-carry on every flight. Casparza’s probably moving a thousand keys a month. He can’t possibly be muling through airports, not in this day and age. He’d lose everything.”

“Just don’t worry about it,” she wearied. Her hand returned to his penis; it was hard again in moments, hard and hot and pulsing with life. “Do it to me again,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll do it to you, all right. You’ll like it.” He turned her over, pushed her on her belly, and spat between her buttocks. Yet another memory, not surprising. Then he plugged his penis into her rectum, humping her hard.

’Rome, Daddy, all those other men—no big deal. It made her feel good because it reminded her of things.

She hung partway off the bed. The moon seemed to bob up and down in the window with Hull’s frenetic thrusts. Janice’s hair tossed; the makak danced dangling about her neck. Each impact beat more memories into her head, more life. The ferocious sodomy seemed to verify something to her. This is what people do, she mused. Hull’s penis was proof of life. She wanted him to come in her again; she wished he could come in her forever, for every time he did was another validation that she was something more than a shadow, more than a ghost.

He shuddered, moaning. Janice felt happy. The warm spurts felt thinner and hotter this time, spurting into her bowel, and she was so happy she wanted to cry. But then—

—she froze.

The face bled into her—black as obsidian and utterly blank.

Raka’s face.

The priest’s voice, an echoic chord, marched across her mind.

Now, it commanded.

Still penetrated, Janice slammed the lamp down on Hull’s head.

The warped words oozed, spreading. Truth is power. Spirit is truth.

The mist of Hull’s consciousness trickled up into the light. His eyes lolled open. Blurred faces hovered like blobs, then sharpened, gazing down. Janice and Casparza. He’d been fucking the girl, hadn’t he? Yes, and then…then…

Goddamn, he thought when the rest of the memory landed.

He tried to get up but he couldn’t.

“Ah, Mr. Hull.” Casparza’s face loomed. “Welcome back, amigo.”

Hull glanced around. The fuckers had tied him down to a table. He was nude. The hissing light from a dozen gas lanterns licked about drab canvas walls. The camp, he realized. The tent.

He was in the big tent.

Janice stood beside the table, wan in her nightgown. Casparza stood opposed, the avalanche of flab straining against his huge shirt.

Standing by a canvas partition was Raka.

“We gain power through spirit, Mr. Hull,” Casparza cryptified. “Raka is an Obeah priest, a papaloi. He was bred to harness the spirit.”

The black priest stood in total lack of movement, the staring face bereft of life as a wooden mask. He wore a necklace of human fingers, or perhaps pudenda, and the thing that hung from his sash was a shrunken baby’s head. But from his hand something else depended, swaying: one of those little bags on a cord, one of the makak.

“I thought we had a deal,” Hull moaned.

“Oh, we do, Mr. Hull,” the fat man assured. “But you want to know my secret, don’t you?”

“I don’t give a fuck about your secret. Just let me loose.”

“In time.” Casparza’s grin seemed to prop up the bulbous face. He nodded to Janice.

I’m fucked, Hull realized. He squirmed against his bonds. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that they were going to kill him. But why? He hadn’t crossed any lines. It didn’t make sense. Had some new mover back home put a contract on him? Had someone fingered him as a stool?

“Look, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t know what’s going on. Just let me go. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

Casparza laughed, fat jiggling.

Janice pushed in a wheeled table like a gurney. Holy motherfucking shit, Hull thought, and it was the palest of thoughts, and the least human. His eyes felt stapled open. On the gurney lay a corpse: a man, an American. It was pale and naked.

“Janice will show you,” Casparza said. “The power of spirit.”

Hull grit his teeth. Janice very deftly slit open the cadaver’s belly with a heavy-gauge autopsy scalpel. She plunged her hands into the rive and began to pull things out. First came glistening pink rolls of intestines, then the kidneys, the liver, stomach, spleen. She tossed each wet mass of organs into a big plastic garbage can. Then she reached up farther for the higher stuff—the heart, the lungs. It all went into the can. By the time she was done, she was slick to the elbows with dark, oxygen-starved blood.

“We can fit six or eight keys into the average corpse,” Casparza informed.

Hull frowned in spite of his dilemma. “You’re out of your mind. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Customs has been wise to it for years.”

Casparza smiled. Now Janice was packing sealed keys into the corpse’s evacuated body cavity, then stuffed in wads of foam rubber to fill in the gaps and smooth things out. She worked with calm efficiency. Finished, she began to sew up the gaping seam with black autopsy suture.

“You can’t smuggle coke into the States in cadavers,” Hull objected. “Customs inspects all air freight, including coffins, including bodies tagged for transport. Any idiot knows that. The girl said you were muling the stuff.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Hull. My mules walk right past your customs agents.”

Wha—, Hull thought. Walk?

Janice raised her nightgown. Hull’s eyes, in dreadful assessment, roved up her legs, over the patch of pubic hair, and stopped. Across her belly was a long black-stitched seam.

“Janice has been muling for me for quite some time.”

My God, was about all Hull could think.

Raka began muttering something, heavy incomprehensible words like a chant. The words seemed palpable, they seemed to thicken amid the air as fog—they seemed alive. Then he placed a makak about the corpse’s neck.

The corpse sat up and climbed off the gurney.

My God, my God, my—

Raka led the corpse out.

Casparza held out his fat hands, his face, for the first time, placid in some solemn knowledge. “So you see, amigo, we still have a deal. And you’ll get to be your own mule.”

Aw, Jesus, Jesus—

The scalpel flashed splotchily in Janice’s hand. Hull began to scream as she began to cut.

A HEADER TALE

“It were horribler than what all ya heard,” Dory Ann Slate says to you, pouring just a touch of corn liquor into a cup. You’d merely come over to her tar-paper shack to express your condolences but now…this.

You had no idea.

“Alls I heard were that yer sister Lucie got kilt by someone who broke inta her house.”

Dory Ann’s bloodshot eyes look larger than they should be, but sunken; in a sense, her entire life looks sunken. She’s forty-five but seemed to age ten years in the last week, the once-robust breasts that all the men would hoot and holler over sagged now in the faded-yellow tube top. She’d always been a part-time mother figure to you, larger than life, brimming with vitality and wisdom. Now she looked dilapidated, the blondish hair lusterless, disarrayed. She sits at the rickety table with her legs crossed, and you can see traceries of thin blue veins.

“Ya wanna hear, Marla?” she asks.

The question shocks you. You shouldn’t want to hear but…

You do. For some reason, you do.

“Oh, Miss Dory, I wouldn’t want ya to pain yerself by talkin’ ’bout it…”

Suddenly, the half-dead eyes momentarily lighten. She pats your hand on the table. “But, see, it make me feel good to talk about it, hon. And God knows I need ta feel good about somethin’.”

“Good?” you gasp without thinking. “But, Miss Dory, how can ya feel good ’bout yer sister gettin’ kilt?”

A mirthless laugh, then another sip. “A’course, ya’d think that, dear. What are ya now, twennie, twennie-one?”

“Naw, I just turnt eighteen.”

“My!” your elder exclaims a bit too loudly. “You are blossomin’, girl! In a way, it’s a shame—pretty as ya are. You’ll learn that that’s a curse, hon, just as I learnt way back when. It’d be best if God just made us all fat’n ugly. My sister Lucie learnt, she learnt the hard way.”

The question harasses you, from some black cranny from the bottom of your soul. Why do you want to know? How can she feel good ’bout talkin’ of her sister’s murder?

“You knowed Lucie a little, right? She was a pretty one too, twennie years younger’n me. My. Our maw had me first. But it was on account’a her looks that got poor Lucie inta such trouble. Fellas wouldn’t leave her alone and the worst part was, she liked that. Rednecks been knockin’ her up since she was fifteen, sixteen, but she had somethin’ wrong inside, so’s she’s lost ’em all. Weren’t until ’bout a year’n a half ago that one took, li’l Cade, she named him. She never tolt who the father was…”

You can’t imagine why Dory Ann pauses but now you notice that you’re all tensed up sitting in the chair opposite her. Your heart is racing.

Outside, the sun is going down. You can hear the crickets and peepers starting up.

“They ain’t shore what night it was, Friday, Saturday, thereabouts. Fella from the sheriff’s department said so. Someone come in and raped her right’n front of the baby in his crib. Raped her a couple’a times, they said, once in her rear, too. Just used her fer a place to git his nut. Young gal like you, Marla? Ya needs ta be aware’a that. Most fellas out there ain’t no good. They talk all sweet’n look good, but at the end’a the day, you ain’t nothin’ but a warm place fer them ta come. And that’s all Lucie was ta this guy. After he was done fuckin’ her, he cut her throat. And then he took a shit on the floor’n pissed on li’l Cade in his crib, they said. Then he left.”

Your stomach lurches at the words, but what bothers you deeper is what she’d said before: You ain’t nothin’ but a warm place fer them ta come. Is that what you are in the eyes of men?

All you can do is gulp.

“But, see, he left the door open—on purpose. Lucie, she lived way on back up the old road past the deadfall, where the ole cobbler Jake Martin used ta live. No one go up there much; no mail delivery neither cos Lucie were squattin’ in ole Marm Lewis’s cos Marm said she could now that she’s at that ghastly nursin’ home.”

Your heart seems to beat with your stammer. “What-what-what…happened to the baby?”

“What’cha think? Three, four days went by ’fore anyone thought to check the house. By then, a’course, varmints got in and got to the baby. Skunk, possum, wild dog. Who knows? They found the poor thing’s body outside, what was left’a it.”

The words make you dizzy.

“And he done all’a that ta my sister, just to git his nut.” But it’s odd how Dory relates the tragedy. Don’t seem much upset, you observe. But you’re upset, that’s for sure.

“See, Marla. It ain’t just that men ain’t no good. It’s that most of ’em are evil. Somethin’ ’bout fuckin’ gals just makes ’em evil.”

Evil, you think.

She looks at you with narrowed eyes. “You know what I’m talkin’ about.”

You stare. Yes, you do know. It had been your mother’s boyfriend who’d done it to you first. You were eleven, twelve? It hurt so much, and there was so much blood. Your mother pretended it was you going from girl to woman, getting your “Curse of Eve,” she said, you she knew what it really was. Come to think of it, she wasn’t much good, either, but at least she never hurt you. There were some teachers, too, before you’d dropped out, then those couple of times your own brother, Floyd, he did it to you, too, and to this day the son of a bitch won’t look you full in the face but he always kind of smiles when he turns away. And to top all that off, one night last winter you were flat-out raped taking the short-cut home from Hull’s General Store where you work. Some creeker hidin’ in the woods who stunk to high heaven.

Yes, it seemed that all men had to offer were pain and sperm. You were determined to having nothing to do with them, ever.

“I thought so,” Dory Ann says of the look on your face. She sipped some more of the harsh, clear liquor. “But, see, I know more’n anyone else cos Lucie, she told me.”

“Told ya what?” you ask in the driest voice.

“She were pregnant again, from the same man who got her pregnant with li’l Cade, and like I said, she never told who, but I know anyway—”

“Who?” the question nearly pulls you from your seat.

“Just you wait,” she says with the thinnest smile. “It were that man who kilt her cos she told him to marry her or she’d go to the county courthouse’n report him, make him get somethin’ called a DNA test. See? Men, they just want their nut’n nothin’ else. Anyway, you know Rhonda Conner up the Crossroads? No, I guess not on account you ain’t old enough to drink and if’n yer smart you’ll never take up the habit,” and then Dory Ann’s soiled eyes flick to her cup. “She tend bar up there, even though she live in Crick City with her paw, and when she were comin’ inta work last night? She hears voices in the parking lot in back, two fellas sittin’ in a pickup. Rhonda figgered they were just smokin’ a joint but she stop ’round the back entrance when she heard one of ’em say, ‘Kilt the cunt, yes sir.’ So Rhonda listened in instead’a goin’ inside. Next, one of ’em says, ‘—cut the knocked-up bitch’s throat, I did. Said she was gonna sue me fer child support.’ That’s what this hosebag said.” Dory Ann’s eyes look miles away now. “That’s how I knowed it was the same guy, and then he said, ‘Shit, I hated that bitch so much, ’fore I kilt her, I suck all the milk out her tits cos, see, she was still lactatin’ from that first one I put in her belly,’ and then he laughed’n said, ‘Tastes sweet, it does.’ So you know what Rhonda did then?”

“What?” you whisper.

“She up’n tolt her paw, Wynchell Conner. See, Wynchell Conner’s the son’a Sisal Conner. You ever hear’a him?”

You reach back in your mind, squinting. “Name might be a little bit familiar but I’se cain’t be shore.”

“It’s familiar, hon. Conners one’a the few decent families from these parts. Bunch’a Conners ’round here but these folks came from Kentucky, I think. Now lemme ask you this…”

You wait and wait, tensing, fidgeting.

Then Dory Ann asks, “You ever heard of a header?”

You stare back at her. Then there’s silence.

Dory Ann nods. “Ever-body’s heard of it, but no one talks ’bout it. S’no wonder. Not somethin’ folks like ta admit they know.”

“But it ain’t real, Miss Dory,” you plead more than state. “Just somethin’ hillfolk make up ’bout how their kin’d get the last say in a feud,” but the look in Dory Ann’s eyes say otherwise.

She pats your hand on the table again. “Headers is real, hon, I hate ta say, and they been goin’ on since the Civil War. It were the Tucktons and the Martins invented it way back when. It was the only way to get someone back proper who done ya a wrong that’s worse than anythin’ ya can imagine. If’n a man kill you wife or rape your child, you snatch his wife, and then, then…”

You don’t need to be told the rest. You don’t even want to think about it. “Dory Ann, what this got ta do with this man Conner?”

Outside grows darker, the crickets louder. Glass clinks as Dory Ann pours more corn liquor.

She seems dreamy. “It were Sisal Conner. He were a good man even if he drank too much. Used to slaughter pigs fer William’s Meat Company but then there came one’a these recessions like what’s goin’ on now, so’s Sisal get laid off when the plant closed. This were like in the seventies, hon. I weren’t but ten myself. But Sisal, he get severance pay from the William’s plant and he buy himself a tractor on account the gover-mitt’d pay folks to cut wheat for somethin’ called a subsidy, and Sisal had some land he hung on to fer years which growed wheat on it. He had a sick wife—Judy May, her name was—so Sisal needed that gover-mitt work to pay the ’lectric bill cos Judy May had some kind’a lung problem where she hadda sleep with this breathin’ machine. A nebber-lizer I think it was called. But, see, there was a family been fuedin’ with the Conners since God knows when, the Crolls, and Horace Croll, he worked fer the gover-mitt subsidy too but he get fired fer bein’ drunk all the time’n stealin’ gas. Well, Horace Croll’s oldest boy—cain’t remember his name—he was in such a swivet ’bout his daddy gettin’ fired while Sisal Conner were makin’ extra money with that tractor he buyed…that Croll boy, he busted inta Sisal’s barn and put somethin’ in the tractor’s gas tank that ruined the engine. Would’a cost a thousand dollars ta git it fixed, so’s Sisal, he go to the bank and get a loan but it took two weeks ta git approved.” Dory Ann’s voice darkens. “He was late on his ’lectric payment so’s the power company cut him off fer a week, and…well, you can guess. Judy May died from some resper-tory attack on account the nebber-lizer turnt off.”

There seems to be a drone in your head now…

Was it some kind of relief that seemed blended into Dory Ann’s despairing face? You ask her, “So…what happened then?” but you think you have a pretty good idea.

“Sisal snatch Croll’s youngest boy first, then, couple nights later, Croll’s ten-year-old daughter, then Horace hisself, and finally, that older boy who ruined his tractor. Each’n ever time Sisal and his closest friends—Jake Martin’n Tuff’n Helton Tuckton, they had theirselfs a header. They knock a hole in each’a their skulls’n then fuck the head.”

The silence after Dory Ann spoke seemed to collapse now, as if a gust had flattened the shack.

“Sisal, he died long time ago but his boy Wynchel’s carryin’ on the family name—Rhonda up the Crossroads is his daughter—”

“And Rhonda told him,” you say to clarify, “told him what she heard that man in the pickup say—

”

Dory Ann nods, then leans over to whisper, “Wynchel, he’s snatchin’ that man tonight, Marla. They’s gonna throw a header…,” and when Dory Ann says header, her eyes suddenly look like those of a young girl.

You open your mouth to speak but words don’t form. You know what you want to ask, but you can’t.

“You wanna go?” Dory Ann asks next.

You answer in the most tenuous breath: “Yes…”

“They’s havin’ it at Wynchel’s place,” she goes on but you notice immediately that Dory Ann’s nipples have erected beneath the drab tube top. You can see them sticking out like bottle caps.

Your own nipples do the same.

You’re going to get to watch a header. You’re going to watch a man fuck another man…in the head.

Or so you think.

Something difficult, now, seems to be on Dory Ann’s mind. She seems tentative, and you can only wonder why. But then the most obvious question occurs to you, like a glass rod snapping in your brain.

“Miss Dory—you ain’t told me yet. Who is the man that kilt Lucie so horrible?”

Dory Ann takes another sip, then looks you dead in the eye. “It’s why youse invited too, Marla. The man kilt my sister is your brother Floyd.”

You stare. You go all over with gooseflesh. Your thoughts smash into each other, and you feel like you’re standing atop a mile-high cliff, looking down.

“So’s I get my proper revenge and so do you, hon, cos sometimes you can tell by the way a man looks through his face that he been doin’ evil things fer a long time. Right, Marla?”

You nod.

“So’s ya shouldn’t care it’s yer own kin—”

“I don’t!” you jump up and squeal, and you’re laughing and crying at the same time and you feel like you’re spinning around like a child’s top, and just the thought of it, the very thought makes you prickly and joyous and damp between the legs, and you practically fall onto Dory Ann and you hug her and kiss her and blubber like a baby.

The clock is ticking. It’s full dark now in the window. The crickets and peepers are almost deafening.

Dory Ann is crying too—in joy. She settles you down, then takes your hand and say, “Come on, hon. It’s time to go…”

A HEADER TALE

PART II

Miss Dory’s warm hand grasps your own. The older woman’s eyes are dull with all the hardships and heartbreaks of life, yet deep beneath that dullness there is a sparkle unlike any you’ve seen.

It’s anticipation.

You suspect that same sparkle might be found in your own eyes now. I’m on my way to see a header, a darker version of your voice reminds you. Yes. A header.

Something you’ve always thought to be a myth, until Miss Dory assured you it was true. The realization should be sickening, yet it’s not, it’s nothing like that at all. Instead, it’s breathlessly thrilling, and when more words finalize that truth, you begin to feel woozy: They’re gonna cut a hole in my brother’s head and then—and then…

The wooziness makes you reel, it fills your nipples with blood and brings out gooseflesh, and you can tell by Miss Dory’s flushed face that she’s feeling the same way. This confuses you, of course. Why?

Is it out of your own sense of revenge?

It must be!

“Hon,” says Miss Dory, walking through brambles, “I’se can tell you got a storm brewin’ in yer head right now, thinkin’ there must be somethin’ wrong with you fer gettin’ all hot ’bout what’s gonna happen to that swamp-scum brother’a yers. I feel it too, but ya know what?”

Your eyes beseech her.

“There ain’t nothin’ wrong with us. It’s so many’a the folks out there! They’re the ones with somethin’ wrong with ’em…”

You let the idea rest and simply move on, wending your way through the darkening forest. Yellow moonlight filters down through the trees; soon it occurs to you that you’re not so much walking through the woods as the woods are swallowing you. Each twisted tree you pass seems like a grotesque figure, a grimacing man frozen, petrified. Are the trees growing more dense now? Thicker, more gnarled and contorted?

Finally, Miss Dory’s hand squeezes yours tighter, and she says, “That there’s Wynchel’s shack.”

Through low branches you see the tiny widows lit. It’s a sizeable, wood-slat shack with a sloped roof. It looks peaceful…

They’s gonna be fuckin’ my brother in the head in there, you realize, and, and…

You can’t wait.

Miss Dory leads you to the porch. “I can tell you’re hurtin’, honey, more’n me probably. What your brother Floyd done ta you, you been holdin’ back in yer heart fer so long, and when I heard it was him that kilt my sister’n li’l Cade? I hurt so bad I dang near jumped off’a the top of Boone’s Gap Cliff.”

You know exactly what she’s talking about—the pain that never goes away, the pain that just stays there stuck in your heart and makes you feel like a great big chunk has been cut out of your soul. More tears well in your eyes…

“But all that changes tonight,” you’re told. “Says in the Bible ‘vengeance is mine,’ and that’s what’s gonna happen. And when Floyd is finally punished proper for the awful things he done, then all that pain we both’re feelin’? It goes away forever!”

Would it, though? Would it really?

You feel numb, and a strange drone sounds in your head when Miss Dory knocks and then the squeaky wooden door swings open. Candles flicker within, and before the sedate light, a bulky figure moves. “Well, howdy, Dory Ann,” greets a deep, husky, but otherwise congenial voice. The figure shows you inside, and at once you’re struck by the coziness of the backwoods abode. Clean wood floors, simple furniture, hand-embroidered curtains. It does not look like the kind of house where evil men have been put to death.

Miss Dory introduces you to the large, overalled figure: Wynchel Conner. Heavily browed, barrel-bellied, broad-shouldered. He looks around fifty, and has a hat on like a train conductor would wear. A big, callused hand shakes yours with enthusiasm. “Well, hey there, Marla. Now, I’se heard ’bout’cha—knew yer Daddy way on back—but sorry I ain’t never met ya before. Me’n my kin? We’s stick mainly ta this side’a the lake. At any rate, ya both’re welcome in my home anytime,” and he pronounces “time” as tam.

You expect other men to be here—that’s how you understand it, at least. When someone throws a header on a person who’s committed a terrible crime, other men from the area show up to…participate. This house, however, feels empty, and it couldn’t be more silent. The narrowed look on Miss Dory’s face tells you that she’s confused as well, to the extent that she speaks up, “Um, Wynchel? Where’s…ever-one else?”

The big man makes a casual shrug, and bids them both to sit down on the ancient couch topped by cushions filled with straw. “Like ta ’splain that to ya, Dory Ann. See, tonight what we’s gonna do is a bit diffurnt from like what happens most times—oh, give me sec whiles I fetch yawl some raspberry cider.”

Amazed, you watch the man depart to a back room. You expect the mood here to be dark, somber, but instead, He’s gettin’ us CIDER? When you look to Miss Dory, you sense her bewilderment too.

Wynchel returns, giving you each a filled mug. His big down-home smile couldn’t feel more out of place. “’S’my daughter Rhonda made it, and I’ll tell ya, that gal can make some cider. She ain’t here now, a’course. I don’t want her ta be seein’…”

His words dissolve. You barely taste the sip you consume, while Miss Dory sips hers with eyes narrowed to slits. “Wynchel, I say, what is goin’ on? You invite us ta come here for…well, you know.”

“Fer a header,” the man finally acknowledges. “Yeah, but—”

Your heart flutters in disappointment like dread. Something happened! Floyd must’a got away’re somethin’! and Miss Dory gives voice to something close to your exact thoughts: “Wynchel, youse mean ya didn’t really catch Floyd? I thought—”

“Oh, I got him, all right”—he shoots a thumb behind him. “Got the varmint tied’n gagged shore as can be in the back. Gandered the dag bastard sittin’ by the lake just this mornin’, trappin’ fer crawdaddies. Couldn’t’a been no easier—just cracked him one in the noggin with my jack, hault his ass inta the truck, and brung him here.” He laughs. “Relax, gals!”

Relax? That’s impossible. In the back of your mind, in a way you can’t control, all the times Floyd raped you replay like someone flitting cards. The look on his face is always there, to the point that your head feels full of pressure and will soon break open. Wynchel jabbers on about various neighbors and gossip while Miss Dory pretends to listen. But you can’t listen—all you can do is sit there, seeing all those images flash through your mind.

“All right, gals. Nuff small talk, I reckon.” He slaps his knees and rises. “Foller me.”

Dead-eyed, you follow Miss Dory and Wynchel, first into the kitchen, whose ancient woodstove dominates the entire wood-walled room. It should be hot here, but the cross breeze from several open windows make the place quite comfortable. You can smell the forest, but then it occurs to you that there’s a particularly strong forest-like scent all around. That’s when you notice a single pot on the stove.

“What’s that smell, Mr. Conner?” you blurt. “Smells nice, like the woods.”

“Oh, I’ll show ya in a minute, but what’cha really wanna see is just on in here,” and then he disappears through a smaller door. With reserved steps, you and Miss Dory follow.

Here a single incandescent bulb burns overhead—Wynchel is one of only a few locals who has electricity—but suddenly this light burns darker, as if your own thoughts have dampened some of its energy. The room smells…odd, nothing like the rich, piney scent from the kitchen but something dense, old, and vaguely repugnant. There are no windows, and dead center is a heavy wooden table on which your brother Floyd has been tied down and gagged. He’s fully clothed yet his jeans have been pulled down; you blanch at the sight of his bunched, withered genitals.

“There he is,” Wynchel’s voice gutters. “Piece’a trash has been lyin’ here all day. Thought I’d give him plennie’a time ta think on things,” and then the big man grabs a handful of Floyd’s greasy black hair and gives it a twist. “Huh, Floyd? You been thinkin’ on things? Hope so, cos ya ain’t gonna be thinkin’ much longer. But look who come ta visit’cha”—Wynchel jerks Floyd’s face and staring eyes toward the door. “Why, if’n it ain’t Dory Ann Slate, you know, the sister’a the poor inner-cint gal you fucked’n kilt. And that li’l baby you pissed all over’n left for the possums was Dory’s nephew. And a’course you know the other gal well—Marla, yer own sister. I don’t gotta remind ya of the awful shit ya done ta her.”

Floyd’s bugged eyes over the gag find yours and freeze. You freeze as well, from head to toe. He mewls something behind the gag but it’s undecipherable.

Wynchel rubs his hands together. “See, ladies, I already done tolt Floyd that we’d be killin’ his sick, sorry ass by throwin’ a header—that’s what I wanted him ta be thinkin’ ’bout all day. But, see, there’s some fellas who do things so terrible that dyin’ by a header just ain’t enough, ya know? It’s kind’a lettin’ him off easy on account he up’n die fairly quick. But fer such folk, we got other ideas.” Wynchel lumbers to the center of the big table, and it’s Miss Dory who catches a breath in her chest when the big man flicks open a pocket knife. Now Floyd’s face is pinkening, his neck canted as he stares shuddering at the blade. “This part, Floyd, ain’t gonna hurt a whole lot…”

Miss Dory hugs you as you both watch Wynchel go to work. He daintily punctures the center of Floyd’s scrotum with the blade, then makes an inch-long slit in the wrinkled flesh. Floyd mewls once and bucks his hips. “This here’s what we call a ‘raw-ballin’.’ We slit the nut sack’n then pop both balls out so’s they’s hangin’ raw outside,” and as his stubby fingers work, both of Floyd’s testicles are pushed through the slit, glistening pinkly and still connected by delicate cords.

“What-what…what’cha gonna do?” Miss Dory asks in a hot whisper.

Wynchel winks—“Be right back”—then leaves the room.

Meanwhile, you continue to stare. You want so much to say so many things to Floyd but you can’t. Your throat is locked up, and your brain is in turmoil from all those images still swirling round and round. It seems like they’ll never stop, but you know that if they don’t stop soon, you’ll kill yourself. It’s the only release.

Wynchel thunks back into the room, holding the pot you’d seen on the woodstove. When he lifts the lid, the rich piney scent that struck you so pleasantly in the kitchen increases tenfold. You hear a faint bubbling sound.

“Like I said, ladies, scum like this un here cain’t be let off easy, no sir. So’s what I got fillin’ this pot is a fair helpin’ of pine sap that I up’n tapped myself just outside—tapped several pine trees, I did, then I heat it all up on the stove till it’s a-bubblin’. Cut it with a li’l turpentine so’s ta not get too thick.”

Floyd’s eyes are bulging so intensely now they seem ready to eject from their sockets. Wynchel continues, “See, in the old days when we was layin’ a raw-ballin’ on someone, we’d always use boilin’ water, but then one time someone—Charlie Fuchson, I’se think it ’twas—he scratch his head’n say in that sky-high voice’a his, ‘Hey, fellas, ain’t there sumpthin’ better’n water we can use? Cos, see, it seem ta me that boilin’ water’ll lose most’a its heat pretty fast after ya up’n dump it,’ and dang if we didn’t all agree with him. I believe that was the day we find some rummie from Waynesville millin’ ’round here, then someone—Tater Kline, it might’a been—actually caught the low-down rube lookin’ in one’a the winders over at Jory Cray’s. The sick scum were peepin’ in on Jory’s li’l ten-year-old daughter Joanie, he was, and beatin’ hisself off, so it were Tater who brung him in. Now, we didn’t throw no header on the trash on account he didn’t kill no one, but we shore as shit needed ta teach him a lesson, and”—Wynchel rolls his eyes and chuckles—“we up’n taught him one in spades that day. Tapped some pine trees we did, fill up a pot’n bring it to a boil while ole Charlie raw-balled the fucker. I tell ya, ladies, when we dumped that boilin’ pine sap on that rummie’s nuts, he made noises like I’d never thunk a human bein’ could make. See, pine sap’ll hold its heat lots longer’n water.” Then Wynchel suddenly points at both of you. “But’cha know what? Never again did that rummie ever look in no little girls’ winders, no sir!” and he trumpets hoarse laughter.

Floyd is jerking against his bonds on the table, such that the legs come an inch off the floor. Wynchel comes back around with the steaming pot and says, “Now, Floyd, member howsI told ya the first part wouldn’t hurt all that much? Well, this part I reckon’ll hurt a holy ever-livin’ SHITLOAD more,” and then he tips the pot just enough to let some of the hellishly hot sap come over the rim and land directly on Floyd’s exposed testicles—

There’s a crackling sizzle, then a muffled roar from your brother’s throat that sounds like something a massive animal might make when gored. Floyd jerks so hard against the rope that all four of the table legs jump up at the same time.

“Theeeeeeeeere ya go! How’d that feel? That feel as good as the nut you had all them times ya raped yer sister, hmm? That feel as good as when you was fuckin’ Lucie Slate after ya cut her throat just so’s she couldn’t sue ya fer child support? In fact, I’lls bet that felt so good, you’ll want some more—”

Floyd’s throat expands he’s screaming so hard against the gag, and then—

Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss…

—Wynchel pours more piping hot sap on the bubbling testicles. “Ooo-doggie, yes sir! I’ll bet that put some kick in yer day, huh, Floyd? Well, shit, ever-one can use a little kick, so, hail! Have some more!”

Now the noises produced by Floyd’s throat sound like some geared machine grinding away with bad sprockets as Wynchel makes another liberal deposit of the insanely hot sap. The sap itself pours thick as honey and is clear save for the faintest amber tint. Now that pleasant pine scent hangs heavy in the room but is laced with something akin to pork sausage breakfast patties, which you assume must be the smell of Floyd’s testicles cooking. Floyd rocks on the table, every muscle corded like cables, eyes lidless in agony.

“Well, looks like we up’n mussed his nuts more’n a tad, huh, ladies? What say we treat the dick itself to a little’a the same,” and after more beast-like roaring from Floyd’s gagged mouth, Wynchel dribbles still more sap on your brother’s horror-shriveled penis. You and Miss Dory watch, enraptured, as the little twist of meat crackles, twitching in a manner that can only be thought of as unearthly.

“Ain’t that fascinatin’?”—Wynchel pours some more sap—“Watch how the dick tries ta git away from that heat by shrinkin’ inta his body,” and, yes, he’s right, the pathetic twist of flesh that so many times debased you and God knows how many other women is now retracting itself, as if attempting escape.

Floyd is positively convulsing now; his face is maroon. Wynchel chuckles, “’S’right, Floyd, you can relax now. See, I’se all out’a sap. But I think that’s a fair ta midland punishment fer all the devilish crimes ya committed, huh?”

Floyd is still conscious, and his body loses some of its tension when Wynchel informs him that the sap is all gone. But then—

“Ho boy! Well, how you like that? Seems I was mistaken, son! This pot—I say—this pot’s still half full!” and then—

Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss…

—he dumps the rest on Floyd’s shivering groin, an amount that must be at least ten ounces. Steam and presumably smoke waft up from the bubbling insult, and what remains of your brother’s genitals cannot be effectively described.

“All right, looks like we’s done with the fun’n games,” Wynchel announces. Floyd lay motionless now on the table, his face still maroon. When Wynchel pushes open an eyelid, you see that the white of Floyd’s eye is marbled crimson, from hemorrhaging. Your question issues as the tiniest peep: “Is he…dead, Mr. Wynchel?”

“Naw, he just up’n passed out on acount’a the pain is all. And don’t’cha worry, we ain’t done with him just yet.”

You and Miss Dory are clinging to one another, and you notice only now that Miss Dory’s left hand is cupping your breast. You look over and see that her own breasts seem enlarged, nipples poking like bolt-ends through the sheer fabric of her top. That’s when you realize that your own nipples jut similarly. Miss Dory seems to speak in a wanton hiss: “Now, right, Wynchel? Youse gonna do the header now?”

“Well, that’s what I’se wanna talk ta ya about but why’s don’t I first git’cha both some more cider?”

Even in the distraction of her anger, Miss Dory does not remove her hand from your breast, and you admit to yourself that you like the way it feels. But she rails, “We don’t want no more fuckin’ cider, Wynchel! Why you jerkin’ us ’round so? You promised youse was gonna throw a header! So do it! Ya cut a blammed hole in that rat bastard’s head’n then you FUCK! HIS! HEAD!”

Wynchel just smiles, and rambles on, “Now, you know ole Marm Lewis, right?”

“A’course, I do, Wynchel!” Miss Dory yells. “She been lettin’ my sister Lucie live in her house since she gots put in that nursin’ home—”

“Um-hmm,” Wynchel nods. “Ole Marm, she been ’round a long time’n—she’s what city folks I think call a matriarch—and, see, since she wind up in that home, I been stoppin’ by to see her once a week, an’ a’course, when Lucie was found kilt in Marm’s house, I tolt Marm cos, well, I’se felt she had a right to know—”

Miss Dory’s face goes pink in her rage. “We don’t wanna hear ’bout Marm Lewis, Wynchel! We wanna see you fuck that man in the head!”

“Yeah, yeah, shore ya do’n I’se can do that if’n ya want, but hear me out full’n right first,” Wynchel keeps up. “What Marm Lewis say ta me that day is she say ‘Wynchel, if’n ya ever catch the evil devil-lovin’ scoundrel that murder Lucie’n her baby in my house, there ain’t but one thang ya can do ta git proper revenge, and youse know what that is, don’t’cha, son?’ an’ a’course, I say, ‘Yes, ma’am, Marm Lewis, we’s’ll shore as hail throw a header on the varmint.’ But then she closes her eyes’n gits ta thinkin’…”

“Thinkin’…’bout what?” you have to ask.

“Well, she says that since Lucie were Dory Ann’s sister, there might be a better kind’a header ta throw, somethin’…more ’pro-pree-at—”

Spittle flies off Miss Dory’s lips: “What in tarnations is you talkin’ ’bout!”

Wynchel keeps rubbing his big rough hands together; he seems gleeful. “Somethin’ she done herself a few times long ago, when dag sick bastards like this here Floyd Cotes do awful stuff ta her kin.”

“A better kind’a header?” Miss Dory keeps yelling. “That don’t make no sense!”

Wynchel mulls something over in his mind. “Ya know, on account Marla here’s so young, I’se think it’d be best if’n I whisper it to ya,” and then the big man approaches Miss Dory, leans over, and whispers something in her ear. When he’s done, the older woman’s eyes slowly go wide and she smiles like an egg-suck dog. “Oh lordie, Wynchel. That sounds dang nice…”

A big husky laugh. “Thought ya’d git a fixin’ fer the idea, ’specially on account both’a youse are gals. So, what’cha think? Ya wanna try?”

“Yes!” Miss Dory blurts, but you don’t understand a thing. You’re so confused, so dizzy, and Miss Dory hugging you like that and playing with your breasts has you getting swampy between your legs. You can scarcely imagine what Wynchel just whispered.

“Lemme show ya.” From a cabinet on the back wall, he picks up a power drill with a hole-saw bit in the chuck. “This here’s what we normally use fer a header”—and he revs it a few times, each rev sending you on your tiptoes and strangely bringing a throb to your privates. “Ya both probably been tolt through the grapevine how it’s done—simple, really. Ya just cut a hole in the top’a his head, pop out the circle’a bone, cut a slit fer yer pecker’n, well…ya slip yer willy in and start a-humpin’. Ya fuck the booger-eater’s brain till ya git’cher nut.”

The crude explanation makes your nipples tingle, then you actually bring your hand between your legs and begin to rub. Miss Dory is rubbing herself too.

“But fer this kind’a header, well…I reckon we’s need a diffurnt kind’a saw.” Wynchel turns back to the cabinet to rummage. “Reckon a plain ole hack-saw’d be fine but, shee-it, that’d take a coon’s age…
Lemme see—ah, yeah, this un here should do the trick,” and now he withdraws another saw, like a circular saw only smaller. It says DE WALT on it. “This here saw’s got a adjuster-bull depth settin’ so’s the blade only cuts so deep. It also got a finishin’ blade with a high tooth-count.”

You stare at the saw. He plugs it in and squeezes the trigger.

Miss Dory squeals in delight, and you’re back on your tiptoes again; now she pulls your hand from your own crotch and places it between her legs. You begin to rub there, and she rubs you the same. The saw screams and screams in its teeth-grinding shrill; Wynchel is very meticulously encircling Floyd’s skull with the saw around where a headband might be placed. Your sex throbs harder when you notice that your brother has regained consciousness, his eyes maniacally wide, his heels and fists thumping the table, yet he remains helpless to do anything about it. You know he’s screaming through the gag but all you can hear is that hot, wonderful, delicious shriek of the saw as Wynchel manipulates the blade all the way around. Then—

Silence.

Does your heart stop? Have your lungs momentarily ceased to take in breath? Miss Dory’s grip on you tightens, and her hand pushes hard against your soaking crotch.

“Theeeeeeeeeere she comes,” Wynchel remarks when he removes the skullcap from Wynchel’s head. It comes off like a hat. “Reckon ya cain’t do no better’n that!” Floyd still shudders slightly on the table; the fact that he’s remained somewhat alive only deepens your horniness. You can’t help it—you whimper a delighted squeal.

The half dome of Floyd’s raw brain glistens a bright pinkish white. A fluid—not blood, since it’s clear—dribbles off the brain to the washtub on the floor. It seems odd that very little blood is in evidence.

Wynchel, ever one to stray off-subject, looks appraisingly at the skullcap. “Ya know, Dory Ann? Looks ta me like the top’a this scumbag’s noggin’d make a fine ashtray, huh? I’se could drop it in some lye water fer a spell, then give it ta ole Charlie Fuchson, ya think? You know how Charlie smokes them big ole stanky cigars? I say he’d up’n love this fer, say, a Christmas present!”

You don’t care about ashtrays or Charlie Fuchson’s cigars. You only want to see what happens next…

On one knee, Wynchel deliberates, eyeing the exposed brain. “Hmm, now—let’s see…,” and, next, he slips his fingers behind the brain, pulls it out some, and with his other hand slips his knife to sever the spinal cord. Instantly, the organ which once harbored Floyd’s personality as well as Floyd’s evil comes out in Wynchel’s hands like a loaf of pumpernickel. Now a steady stream of blood slides out of the brainpan and dribbles into the tub, pattering like rain on a tin roof. Wynchel stands up, ever chuckling. “Guess he’s dead now, huh? Ya think?” but then he peers more scrutinously at the glistening mass in his hands. “Wonder if’n there’s anythin’ still a-goin’ on in this here evil brain? Shucks, I shore hope so!” He laughs loud enough to shake the wooden walls. “Well, gals, now’s the time. You first, I suppose, Dory. We’s all neighbors so there ain’t no call ta be bashful…”

Miss Dory is visibly panting. You feel the fabric between her legs is drenched, and then she drops her sundress to the floor, her breasts achingly gorged, nipples like hot gumdrops. Wynchel pops a complimentary brow, clears his throat, then passes Miss Dory the brain. “All Marm Lewis said ya gots ta do is…well…rub it back’n forth over yer girly-works.”

You stand in utter, consummate shock as Miss Dory lies down on the wood floor. So delirious she is with desire that her tongue hangs out of her mouth and she whines dog-like as she spreads her bare legs wide and begins to rub the slick brain over her sex.

“There’s the ticket!” Wynchel celebrates. “This here’s what’cha call a header fer gals, Marla! Juss like Marm Lewis say!”

You look at him but cannot in a million years respond.

Already the application of the brain to Miss Dory’s inflamed vulva is goading her into a frenzy; she’s heaving on the floor, her buttocks grinding, her feet rowing the air in what appears to be ecstasy like none ever before felt by anyone.

It excites you seeing her do this, excites you to the point of vertigo, and you know it’s because that brain, that disgusting, despicable, filth-stuffed brain used to occupy your brother’s skull. Miss Dory’s eyes are crossing, she’s drooling, hitching, shrieking in an insurmountable bliss.

“Young as you is, Marla, ya probably don’t knows a whole lot ’bout headers, but, see, fer instance, when a fella’s fuckin’ a brain—don’t matter if it’s a man’s or a gal’s—when he get his nut’n starts to feelin’ his dick-snot squirt?”—Wynchel shakes his head and whistles—“Mm-HMM! It’s the dang best nut’a his life, better’n any reg-ler hob-knobbin’ he ever had. ’S’true, hon, cos I know from ’spearience. Now, no one know why a header’s a better nut, but it’s been spek-ah-lated that a brain’s chock full’a all these special juices that makes all yer brain cells work together. Anyway, we always wondered why’s havin’ a nut in a brain feel better’n havin’ one in a cunt—er, pardon my rough language, hon—but one time when we was throwin’ a header on some creeker we’s caught takin’ a shit in Morris Croll’s well, and we all had dandy nuts, we did, but then one’a us—’twas Doc Tidwell, now’s I think of it—the doc’s got hisself some learnin’, and he tolt us them juices in the brain even got a name—neural-transmitterers, er somethin’ fancy like that…Anyways, the doc, he say that maybe it’s them special juices that give ya a dandy nut, huh? Like when yer dick’s stuck balls-deep in someone’s head, well, that dick soak up some’a them juices whiles its goin’ in’n out, and that’s what give ya the best nut’a yer life.” Wynchel shrugs. “Stands ta reason them brain juices’ll work on gals, too, once their pussy soak ’em up—er, pardon my rough language.”

You’ve scarcely heard a word he’s said, your attention instead commandeered by all that inexplicable lust bubbling up from your groin to your head as you watch, watch, watch Miss Dory clenching nude on the floor and rubbing that warm, wet brain hard all over her crotch as if desperate to actually push it inside. With an inhuman agility, then, her body arcs off the floor, her hips jutting, and she shrieks long and hard, then collapses, drooling.

“Dang, Dory!” Wynchel chuckles. “When a gal makes more racket than a busted chainsaw, I guess that means she had herself a dandy nut!”

Miss Dory stares upward, panting like a parched animal. “I ain’t never felt nothin’ so good, ever,” she whispers, “and now you gotta feel it too, Marla,” and she reaches desperately up, pulls you down to the floor, and peels off your shorts. She splays your legs, licks your sex several times, then places Floyd’s brain there and begins to rub. The impossible sensations nail you in place as something indeed begins to seep into you through your sex, kindling every nerve and inundating you with pleasures you cannot imagine and those pleasures build up and up like steam in a pressure cooker as the brain slides up and down up and down up and down, and then you scream and Miss Dory grins and Wynchel hoots as your heels and fists pummel the floor and your orgasm breaks like a mudslide and for the first time in longer than you can remember, the pain is gone and you know it will never return, and then Miss Dory kisses you and cuddles you and whispers, “Marla, hon? With all the evil men there is in the world, we’s just gonna have ta have ourselfs more headers…”

“Yes,” you whisper back. “A lot more.”

THE CITY OF SIXES

Six minutes after he officially died, Slydes found himself standing agog on a street corner like none he’d ever seen. He stood as he had in life: broad shouldered, tall, dark dirty hair, and a bushy black beard. Blue jeans and work boots, and his favorite T-shirt stretched tight over his beer belly; it read ST. PETE BEACH - A QUIET LITTLE DRINKING TOWN WITH A FISHING PROBLEM. Slydes was a redneck, tried and true, a shitkicker. A badass. He’d seen a lot of—for lack of more elegant phraseology—fucked-up shit in his day, but now…Now…

This?

The wind screamed. Winged mites swarmed in the humid air and splotched red when he swatted them against his brawny forearms. What kind of city is this? the horrid question occurred to him when his gaze was dragged upward. Dim, drear-windowed skyscrapers seemed a mile high and leaned this way and that at such extreme angles, he thought they might topple at any moment. Twisted faces that couldn’t possibly be Human peered out of many of the narrow windows, while other windows were either broken out or spattered with blood. The sky visible between each building appeared to be red, and there was a black sickle moon hanging between two of them. Slydes blinked.

A dream, it had to be. It was this notion that he first entertained. His Condemnation only minutes old, he couldn’t remember much. He couldn’t remember where he was born, for instance, he couldn’t remember his age, nor could he remember his last name. Indeed, Slydes couldn’t even remember dying.

But die he had, and for a lifetime of wincingly outrageous sins and wickedness, he’d been Damned to Hell.

So here he was.

A nightmare, that’s all, he convinced himself. A red sky? Office buildings leaning over at sixty-degree angles? And—

SWOOSH

A black bat with a six-foot wingspan and a vaguely Human face glided by just over his head. Slydes felt a stinking gust, then recoiled when the impossible animal shat on his head.

“Fucker!” Slydes yelled.

The bat—actually a Hexegenically created Crossbreed of one of several genera known as Revoltus chiropterus—looked over its leathery shoulder and smiled.

“Welcome to Hell,” it croaked.

Slydes stared after the words more than the creature itself. Hell, he thought quite obliquely. I’m not really in—

WELCOME TO ST. PUTRADA CIRCLE, HELL’S NEWEST FISTULATION & TRANSVERSION PREFECT, the sign severed his thoughts.

Slydes could only stare at the sign as the splat of monstrous guano ran down the sides of his face.

Hell’s Newest…WHAT?

At the corner another sign blinked DON’T WALK, and then a rush of pedestrians crossed the street. Slydes just kept staring…

He didn’t know what they were at first: People? Monsters? Combinations of both? A slim couple held hands as they strode by, flesh rotting from their limbs and faces. Several impish children wove through the crowd, with fangs like a dog’s and eyes as big and as red as apples. A Werewolf in a business suit and briefcase passed next, and next after that a fat clown with a hatchet in its face. To Slydes, the clown bid, “Hi, how are ya?”

Slydes could not respond.

If anything, the street was worse. Cars that looked more like small steam engines chugged by on spoked wheels, a smokestack up front gusted black-yellow soot and water vapor. Carriages and buggies rolled by as well, hauled along not by horses but by things like horses, whose flesh hung in dripping tatters. One carriage was occupied by a woman with skin green as pond scum who wore a tiara of gall stones and a dress made from tendons meticulously woven together. She fanned herself with a webbed, severed hand. In another carriage rode a creature that could’ve been a pile of snot somehow shaped into Human form. Then came a haulage wagon of some sort, powered by six harnessed beasts with festering carnation-pink skin pocked with white blisters; Slydes thought hideously of skinned sheep when they bleated and spat foamy sputum. A man perched behind them cracked a long, barbed whip—or…perhaps man wasn’t quite right. He wore a wool cloak and banded leggings like a shepherd of the old days, yet atop his anvil-shaped head grew a brow of horns. The whip cracked and cracked, and the bleating rose to a mad clamor. Slydes looked one more time and noticed that, like the bat, these bald “sheep” had faces grimly tainted by Human features.

“Oh my God, I am in some shit,” Slydes stammered. Things were starting to click in his head, and with each click came more and more fear. Did a tear actually form in his eye? “I-I-I,” he blubbered. “I don’t think this is a dream…”

“It’s not,” sounded a voice that was somehow raspy and feminine simultaneously. The woman who approached him was nude, and yet—he thought at first—checker boarded. Slydes squinted at her impressive physique, and then recalled women with similar physiques whom he’d raped and sometimes even murdered without vacillation. But this woman?

Every square inch of her skin was crisply darkened by black tattoos of upside-down crosses. Even her face, around which shimmered long platinum blonde hair.

“Slydes, right?” she asked. “My name’s Andeen, and I’m your Orientation Directress. You may not even realize this yet, but you’re what’s known as an Entrant.”

“Entrant,” Slydes murmured.

“And, no, this isn’t a dream. You should be so lucky. This is all real. Over time your memory will re-form.”

Before Slydes could mutter a question, his gaze snapped to another passerby: another impressively figured nude woman. Her arms, legs, abdomen, and face were but one colossal psoriatic outbreak. Only the breasts and pubis were without blemish.

“Rash lines,” remarked Andeen. “In the Living World you have tan lines, here we have rash lines.”

Slydes’ gaze snapped back to the tattooed woman. “Here…as in…”

“As in Hell. You’re dead, and for your worldly sins, you’ve been Condemned.” Her slender shoulders shrugged. “Forever.”

Slydes began to grow faint.

She grabbed his hand and tugged. “Come on, Slydes. We gotta get you out of this Prefect. It’s really fucked up here,” and then she tugged him down the street a ways and ducked into an alley. “We’ll lay low awhile, and try to get you someplace where your ass won’t be grass.”

“I-I,” Slydes blubbered. “I don’t understand.”

“Trust me, there’s no good place in Hell, but there are places that are worse than others. Like this place, St. Putrada Circle. You must’ve been a real scumbag to be Rematerialized here. Yes, sir, a real humdinger of a shitty person.”

“I don’t understand!” Slydes now sobbed outright.

“A Prefect is like a small District. And this one happens to be a Fistulation and Surgical Transversion Prefect. I’ll keep an eye out for Abduction Squads. They’ll Transvert anybody here, Humans and Hellborn alike, but Humans are the desired target. The Surgery Centers pay the most for Humans.”

Slydes looked cross-eyed at her.

“The short version. Every Prefect, District, or Town has to have an active mode of punishment, while there are some areas, known as Punitaries, that exist solely for punishment. But anyway, this Prefect uses Fistulatic Surgery to conform to the Punishment Ordinances. Fistula is Latin; it means ‘communication between,’ and Transversion is, like, re-routing things. That’s what they do here—they re-route your insides.”

Even though Slydes didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, he stammered, “Whuh-whuh-why?”

Andeen smirked. “Because it’s perverse and disgusting…the way it’s supposed to be. This isn’t Romper Room, Slydes. This is Hell, and Hell is hardcore. Eternal torment, suffering, and abhorrence is the name of the game. It pleases Lucifer, therefore, it’s Public Law.” She smirked more sharply this time. “Look, go over to that public wash basin and wash the bat shit out of your hair. It’s grossing me out.”

Dazed, Slydes noted the elevated stone basin only feet from the alley mouth. He dunked his head in the water, agitated the rank guano out of his hair, then seized up and jerked his head out when he realized what he was washing in. “That’s not water! That’s piss!”

“Get used to it,” Andeen said. “Unless you’re a Grand Duke or an Archlock, you’ll never get near fresh water. Only other way it to distill it yourself out of the blood of what you kill.”

Revolted, Slydes flapped the piss off his face, then noticed lower basins erected intermittently along the smoky street. “What are those things? They look like—”

“Oh, the commodes. It’s another Public Law. In this Prefect, it’s mandatory that everyone urinate, defecate, and give birth in public.”

Slydes’ bearded jaw dropped.

“And there,” Andeen pointed, “across the street. There’re the various Surgery Suites.”

Slydes’ crossed eyes scanned the signs over each transom…

RECTO-URINARY TRANSVERSION

URETHRAL-ESOPHAGEAL REVERSAL

UTERO-RECTAL FISTULA

And many, many more.

Andeen’s evilly tattooed hand pulled him back into the alley. “And look, there’s an Abduction Squad. The clay men are called Golems. They’re like state employees, public works, police, security, stuff like that…”

Slydes watched with a cheek to the edge of the alley wall as a troop of gray-brown things shaped like men thudded down the sidewalk, each shoving along a handcuffed Human, Demon, or Hybrid. The Golems were nine feet tall, and walked in formation. Then they all stopped at the same time, and marched their prisoners into various Surgery Suites.

“And like I said, the State pays more money for Humans, so that’s why we gotta get you out of the Prefect.”

Slydes whipped his face back around, and repeated, helplessly now, “I don’t understand…”

“Once you’ve seen what goes on here…you will. Oh, and check out this chick.”

Slydes watched as a morose-faced nude woman who appeared to be half Human and half Troll staggered toward one of the street commodes. She leaned over, parted her buttocks, and began to urinate out of her anus, and when she was done, she turned around, squatted, then began to wince. Slydes winced right along with her as they watched the incredulous act. Long trails of feces slowly squeezed out of her vagina and dropped into the commode.

“See?” Andeen asked. “Oh, wow, and check this out! Here comes a Uteral-Oral Fistulation…”

A woman in a bloody smock labored down the street. She was covered with red-rimmed white scales…and obviously quite pregnant. She held a scaled hand to her bloated belly, and when she could walk no longer she stopped, leaned over, and—

SPLAT!

—out gushed a slew of amniotic water from her mouth. She maintained the uncomfortable position, and as her belly began to tremor, her jaw came unhinged. Her throat began to impossibly swell, and as her stomach shrunk in size, a squalling, demonic fetus slid hugely out of her mouth and flapped to the pavement.

“How’s that for the spectacle of childbirth?” Andeen jested. “Pregnancy is a big deal in Hell, Slydes. If Lucifer had his way, every single female lifeform here would be pregnant at all times. You see, the more babies, the more food, fuel, and fodder for Lucifer’s whimsy.”

Slydes leaned against the wall, moaning, “No, no, no…”

“Yes, yes, yes, my friend. And if you think that was bad, get a load of this guy. Remember what I said about pregnancy?”

Slydes’ gaze involuntarily veered back to the street. This time, a Human man stumbled along. He wore a “wife-beater” T-shirt and stained boxer shorts dotted with Boston Red Sox insignias. If anything, though, his stomach looked even more bloated than the woman who’d just delivered a devilish baby through her mouth.

Slydes stammered further, in utter dread, “He’s not—he’s not—he’s not—”

“Pregnant?” Andeen smiled darkly. “Male pregnancy is a fairly new breakthrough here, Slydes. And you can bet it tickles Lucifer pink. Teratologic Surgeons can actually transplant Hybrid wombs into male Humans and Demons. It’s a trip. Watch.”

Slydes watched.

Grimacing, the bloated man stepped out of his boxers and squatted. Amid boisterous grunts and wails, his rectum slowly dilated, then—

He shrieked.

—out poured a slew of what looked like squirming hairless puppies, with tiny webbed paws and little horns in their heads.

“Ah,” Andeen observed, “a brood of Ghor-Hounds. Pretty rowdy, huh?”

“Rowdy!” Slydes bellowed. “This is FUCKED UP! That guy just pumped a litter of PUPPIES out his ASS!”

“Yeah. And watch what he does now…”

Gravid stomach gone now, the exhausted man abandoned his litter on the sidewalk and trudged over to one of the street commodes. What, he’s gonna take a piss? Slydes wondered when the man poised an understandably shriveled penis over the commode.

The answer to his question, however, would be a most indubitable No.

Now the man’s cheeks billowed. He began to grunt.

And his penis…began to swell.

“Ahhhh,” he eventually moaned as the penis, next, began to disgorge firm stools. Quite a number of them squeezed out and dropped into the commode. When he was finished, he pulled his boxers back on, and at the same time caught Slydes staring agape at him.

“What’s the matter, buddy? You act like you never saw a guy take a shit through his dick before.”

“In case you’re wondering,” his hostess said, “the procedure that guy underwent is called a Recto-Urethral Fistulation…”

Slydes reeled. When he could regain some modicum of sense, he glared back at Andeen and howled, “This is impossible! Women can’t have babies out their mouths! Their mouths aren’t big enough! And men can’t shit turds through their cocks! Their peeholes aren’t wide enough! It’s IMPOSSIBLE!”

Andeen seemed amused by Slydes’ crude rant. “You’ll learn soon enough that in Hell…anything is possible. Now come on.”

Dizzied, aghast, Slydes trudged after her. She walked fast, her high breasts bouncing, her flawless rump jiggling with each stride. “Once I get you out of this Prefect and on one of the Interways, you’ll be a lot safer. Believe me, you don’t want to hang out here.” She grinned over her shoulder. “You’re damn lucky I’m an honest Orientation Directress, Slydes.”

“Huh?”

“There are a lot of dishonest ones. They’d tip off an Abduction Squad and turn you in—for money, of course.”

“Huh?”

“Just come on. I know, you’re confused right now, and you can’t remember much. Eventually it’ll all sink in, and you’ll be all right.”

Slydes sorely doubted that he would ever be All Right, not in Hell. But he did feel some gratitude toward Andeen for endeavoring to get him out of the abominable Prefect. Anywhere, anywhere, his thoughts pleaded. Take me anywhere because no matter how bad the next place is, it can’t be as bad as this…

“Here’s the shortcut out, and don’t worry about the gate,” she said. She lifted something from beneath her tongue. “I have the key.”

Thank God… Slydes followed the lithe woman down another reeking alley whose end terminated in a chain link gate closed by an antiquated lock. When Andeen finicked with the key, rust sifted from the keyhole.

That thing better open, Slydes fretted.

“I guess the hardest thing to get used to for a Human in Hell is, well, the insignificance. Know what I mean?”

“Huh?” Slydes said.

“No matter what we were in the Living World, no matter how strong, how beautiful, how rich, how important…in Hell we’re nothing; in fact, we’re less than nothing.” She giggled, still jiggling the key. “We’re like those non-characters in the beginning of a novel—I guess it’s called the prologue?—where we don’t really have a purpose like a regular character. Follow me, Slydes?”

“Uh, no. Ain’t much for readin’.”

Andeen shrugged. “We don’t do anything for the plot or anything for the meaning of the book. Seriously. In Hell, a Human is like one of those sub-characters that only exists to introduce the reader to the setting…”

Slydes was getting pissed. “I don’t know what’cher talkin’ about! Just open that fuckin’ lock so we can get out of here!”

She giggled but then frowned. “Damn. This bugger’s tough. Check the alley entrance, will you—”

“All riiiiiiiii—” but when Slydes looked behind him he shrieked. Proceeding slowly down the alley was a congregation of the short, dog-faced, imp-like things he’d seen chicanering previously on the street. They grinned as they moved forward, fangs glinting.

Slydes tugged Andeen’s arm like a child tugging its mother’s. “Luh-luh-look!”

Andeen’s tattooed brow rose when she glanced down the alley. “Shit. Broodren. They’re demonic kids and they’re all homicidal. The little fuckers have gangs everywhere—”

“Open the lock!”

She played with the key most vigorously, nervous herself now. “They’ll haul our guts out to sell to a Diviner, then they’ll fuck and eat what’s left…”

“Hurry!” Slydes wailed.

Suddenly the pack of Broodren broke all at once into a sprint, cackling.

When they were just yards away—

CLACK!

—the lock opened. Slydes peed his jeans as Andeen dragged him to the other side. She managed to re-lock the gate just as several Broodren pounced on it, their dirty taloned fingers and toes hooked over the chain links.

“Jesus! We barely made it!”

Andeen sighed, wiped her brow with her forearm. “Tell me about it, man.”

“What now?” Slydes looked down a stained brick corridor that seemed to dog-leg to the left. “How do we get out?”

“Around the corner,” Andeen said.

They trotted on, turned the corner, and—

“Holy motherfuckin’ SHIT!” Slydes yelled when two stout, gray-brown forearms wrapped about his barrel chest and hoisted him in the air. Tall shadows circled round in total silence.

Slydes screamed till his throat turned raw.

“One thing you need to know about Hell,” Andeen chuckled, “is that trust does not exist.”

Five blank-faced Golems stood round Slydes now, and it was in the arms of a sixth that he was now captive.

One of them handed Andeen a stack of bills. “Thanks, buddy. This guy’s a real piece of work. He deserves what he’s getting,” and then she winked at Slydes and pointed up to another transom. It read: DIGESTIVE TRACT REVERSAL SUITE.

“For the rest of eternity, Slydes,” she intoned through a sultry grin. “You’ll be eating through your ass and shitting out your mouth.”

“Nooooooooooooo!” Slydes shrieked.

The Golems trooped toward the door, Slydes kicking and screaming, all to no avail.

“Welcome to Hell,” Andeen bid the parting words.

Slydes’ screams silenced when the Suite door slammed shut, and Andeen traipsed off, greedily counting the stack of crisp bills. Each bill had the number 100 in each corner, but it was not the portrait of Benjamin Franklin that graced each one, it was the face of Adolf Hitler

THE DEVILTRY OF ELEMENTAL VALENCE

March 15, 2000

It was a Parson’s Model F144 power trencher that Ryan Cooper climbed onto; no frills and no canopy, just four wheels, a seat, and 750 horses on the digging blade. Cooper, a wiry guy with tattoos and too many death metal ballads in his head, lit a Winston and expertly jinked the cutter over the grave.

Fuck me six ways till Sunday, he thought. A norther was coming in; the air had teeth. But his boss at Horace B. Knowles Funeral Home has offered him under-the-table double time to do this job today. No taxes taken out.

Fuck.

That was eighteen clams per hour. Four-hour job. And that meant…

A solid night of Johnny Black at the Ruff Stone on Metcalf and then a blow job on Allens Avenue. Ryan cut a grin. Fuck. Maybe two blow jobs. The whores are always more desperate in the winter. Ten, fifteen bucks…

Fuck. I’m there.

Those dizzy crackheads could smoke a pole like nobody’s business.

Coop whistled Slayer’s “South of Heaven” when he throttled the cutter down. He’d done this job long enough that he could sense depth. This plot was a “three-stacker,” and Cooper’s concern was top of the stack. He dug back and forth until the burial perimeter was thoroughly tilled, then he pulled a neutral steer, traversed the guttering trencher 180 degrees, and began to take out the earth with the scoop.

Biohazard, Pro-Pain, Machine Head, Vader—filled Coop’s head; he dethrottled to idle for a smoke break when—

“Hi, there…”

Coop cast an intolerant glance down from the high seat. Looking back up at him was some gussied up fat guy, mid-fifties or thereabouts, dark suit and tie, Burberry overcoat that probably cost more than Coop earned in a month. He turned up a fruity smile.

“I see the transfer’s right on time,” the man said. “This is plot 64E-031537, I take it?”

“Yeah,” Coop sniped back. “Some asshole paid fifteen grand to have the corpse moved to the west end with its own stone.”

The visitor’s bulbous face twitched. “Then I suppose that means I’m the ‘asshole.’
”

Cooper shrugged. It never occurred to him to apologize. Fuck. You wanna drop fifteen large to move a stiff that’s been in the ground since Prohibition? Knock yourself out. “Family member, huh?”

Another fruity smile, belly sticking out like a bushel basket under the overcoat. “You could say that. You don’t mind if I watch, do you? I’m Dr. Oleg Fichnik.”

That’s a name? Cooper wondered. Did he say fishdick?

“And I have a copy of my receipt from Mr. Knowles.”

“Keep it,” Coop said. “You wanna watch me move a stiff, that’s okay by me.” It was probably this guy’s great grandpappy he was digging up, and the fat swish was here to make sure Coop really did the job. Lotta scandal in the grave business nowadays; Coop had taken a few kickbacks himself to dig a hole and cover it back up, sans casket. Resell the box, cremate the body, flush the ashes. Nobody knew.

He flicked his butt and got back to work, revving the Parson’s engine and lowering the scoop on the back. In minutes he had expertly removed a perfect rectangle of earth and piled it at the foot of the plot.

Dr. Fichnik glanced intently into the hole.

“Keep your silk shirt on, professor,” Coop said when he cut the engine and hopped off. His head thrummed with “Dead Skin Mask.” He grabbed a shovel. “Any idea if the casket was metal or wood?”

“Veneered mahogany,” the odd fat visitor replied. “The Brundage ‘Serenity’ series, guaranteed to be waterproof and to resist decomposition indefinitely. I have an original advertisement from the local newspaper of the time. Would you like to see it? It says guaranteed.”

Coop chuckled smoke. “Good luck suing the manufacturer if they’re wrong. Look, man, if the casket’s intact, I pull it out by sway bars, but if it’s collapsed, then the regs say all I gotta do is scoop out the dirt, put it in a hopper, and then dump it in the new plot you bought.”

“I…understand,” Fichnik intoned, peering closer.

“Just wanted to prepare you,” Cooper obliged. “You might not want to watch me scooping up a bunch of dirt full of your relative’s bones.”

“He’s not exactly a relative,” the doctor said. “He’s a famous figure from American history. We wanted him moved to an appropriate plot with his own stone.”

Coop barely heard him. He wanted this job done and his dick in whore-mouth ASAP; he could be digging up George Fucking Washington for all he cared. Now it was Legion of the Goat’s, “Slain and Lain,” an upbeat little number about necrophilia, in his head as he tested the skimmed grave with his shovel and did indeed find an intact coffin down there. Suck my ass! he thought. Now he’d have to pull the whole thing, which was a major kick in the cock. He’d have to hammer in the sway bars and torque the blades closed. But…

All in a day’s work at Swan Point Cemetery.

Out of my way, Fishdick, he thought, grabbing the tools and getting to it. Fichnik watched over his shoulder like an executive chef supervising his apprentices as Cooper hammered the bars down along the casket’s side and torqued them up with a box wrench, more death metal beating behind his skull. It wasn’t long before he’d hooked up the pull-chains and was lifting the casket out of the ground with the trencher’s winch.

The engine chugged as the casket dangled.

“Put it down!” Fichnik shouted over the diesel noise.

Coop winced. “What?”

“Put it down! Please!”

Coop lowered the box and dethrottled. “What the fuck for?”

Dr. Fichnik sheepishly approached the trencher. “If you don’t mind, young man, I’d like to open the casket.”

Cooper lit another Winston. “Yeah, and I’d like to fill Gillian Anderson’s bellybutton with cum. But it ain’t likely either’ll happen.”

“I merely would like to inspect the structural state of the cadaver before it’s moved.”

“And I’d merely like to inspect Jenna Jameson’s fuckin’ cervix, pal. Dream on. I can’t let you open the coffin. It’s against the law without a warrant or an order from the medical examiner.”

Like a card trick, a $100 bill appeared in Fichnik’s fingers.

“Or a hundred dollar bill,” Coop amended. He snatched up the bill. Whole lotta blow jobs tonight, he thought. Shit, with this kind of green he could rent a motel room and turn a bunch of junkies’ cunts inside out; they’d be walking bowlegged back to their pimps. The fuck do I care? This turd burglar wants to eyeball a skeleton, well…He slipped the bill into his pocket. Whatever tickles his stick. “Here ya go, Rocky.” Cooper passed the rotund man a crowbar.

“Really, I…”

“Oh, a long time since your last workout?”

“Well…”

“For another hundred, I’ll open it for ya,” Cooper was charitable enough to offer.

No objection was made as another hundred dollar bill was purveyed. Cooper took it and hopped off the trencher. Now we’re talkin’. He wedged the crowbar under the coffin’s lid, leaned down.

No give at all.

Damned thing’s shut tighter than a twelve-year old’s asshole, he thought as he grabbed his hammer, tapped the crowbar in deeper. One thing Coop knew about coffins was that their locking mechanisms were all different. Come on, you little bitch…

Fichnik seemed amused. “How’s it coming…Rocky?”

How about I stick this crowbar up your ass, Liberace? Bet I’d pull out a bunch of used rubbers and a butt plug or two. But Cooper, in spite of his overall societal hostility, would not be dissuaded. He moved the crowbar farther down the lip, hammered it in, then stood on it.

He began to rock his full body weight against the bar.

“Be careful!” Fichnik exclaimed.

Shut up, Cooper thought. He began to bounce to the rhythm of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Waking the Dead.” Carefully balanced with both feet on the bar, Coop bounced harder—

“Be care—“

CRACK!

Wood splintered. Decades-old locking teeth tore out of brass bolt slots.

The coffin’s lid flew open, and—

Hoooo!

—Cooper plummeted. He landed hard on his back before the gravestone, then actually tumbled over once and fell directly into the opened grave.

Luminous stars burst before his eyes, an interesting accompaniment to the Suicidal song. It took a moment for him to retrieve the wind that had been knocked from his chest. When he finally managed to crawl up from the hole…

Dr. Fichnik was looking down into the casket, his wide back to Cooper.

“Oh…oh my,” the man croaked.

“What is it, Dr. Fishdick?” Cooper asked, crawling out of the hole.

“I knew it. I knew it.”

Cooper finally got to his knees in the surrounding mounds of dirt. He wasn’t in the best of moods.

Fichnik quickly faced him, grabbed his shoulders. “I knew it,” he whispered.

Cooper looked down into the opened coffin and saw—

March 15, 1877

Brock’s eyes squeezed shut as if pained. He felt his jism jump into the hot slot between the whore’s wide-spread legs. His hips pounded the back of her buttocks almost violently. No, oh no, he thought. Forgive me, Lord. I just can’t help it…

He came so hard the frame of the little jack bed nearly fell apart.

“Gracious, sugar,” came a lilting voice. “That was fierce as if you ain’t had a woman’s company in a year…”

The whore’s name was Mary, but then a lot of whores were named Mary, since the Magdalene was forgiven. This one was Brock’s favorite—ample-bosomed and blonde, with noon-blue eyes and a soft voice that made a man feel like he was with someone wholesome. Brock liked the appearance; it didn’t matter that all five of Suttonville’s trollops were little more than pretty spittoons for a man’s need. A shot of Kansas whiskey and a Jennings Bryan dollar was all it took. Each of the girls had their own little sod house out behind the Short Branch saloon. Brock didn’t want this sort consorting in the public house, lest Suttonville gain the same reputation as Wichita, Ellsworth, or Dodge.

Brock was Suttonville’s sheriff.

He struggled for breath. He left his cock stuffed up in her, let it limpen and eventually fall out. Then he collapsed to her bosom, exhausted.

She was exhausted too, from the frenetic working over he’d just given her. Three times in less than an hour. His cock hurt; he could only imagine how she felt.

But in his exhaustion, he shivered.

“You’re not catchin’ sick, are ya?”

“No,” Brock mouthed into the hot skin between her breasts. Instead, he was simply horrified.

The little sod house stank: of sweat, sperm, and the daub of pig fat burning in the betty lamp. Her breath stank, too; her teeth had gone to rot. Yet Brock felt soothed as her long pretty fingers slid through his hair. “What’choo so pent up about, honey?”

Brock didn’t answer—he just lay there on her sweat-slick flesh like a baby suckling. No, it wasn’t any surge of lust that had brought him here (Brock routinely fucked at least every other day), it was diversion.

Brock needed to be distracted from the memory of what he’d seen this morning. The images shouted at him whenever he closed his eyes.

God in Heaven…

He wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

“There’s rumors goin’ round,” Mary posed.

“Oh yeah?”

“Virgil at the Short Branch said he saw you’n Clyde Nale bring in a dead man this morning in Clyde’s wagon.”

“It wasn’t a dead man,” Brock’s voice grated back. “Doc says he’s unconscious, in a coma.”

“A—What’s that?”

Brock couldn’t get the strange man’s face out of his head. “Never you mind. That’s all fer the rumors?”

“Naw, somethin’ about the Bowen Place. Virgil said he heard they was all kilt.”

Brock squeezed his eyes shut hard.

She nudged him. “Well? Is it true?”

Then the rest of the images followed. Those people. The child.

And all the blood.

“Never you mind,” Brock whispered.

Back in his boots and buckskins, Sheriff Brock walked down Front Street, the high sun at his back. Several wagons owned by skinners sat hitched before the Short Branch, their owners hooting up a good day’s work beyond the swing doors. Old Man Harding leisurely chewed a plug from his rocking chair in front of the Overland Telegraph office. Men strode in and out of the wainwright’s shop, and the barreler’s, the smith’s. Children frolicked about the general store, rejoicing over fat sugar cones, pinafored girls working whirligigs, and overalled boys spinning their teetotums in the earthen street, pretending to be gamblers. Dogs lolled in the sun; women bickered over lye and sorghum prices.

A nice normal town.

My town, Brock thought.

Since the Homestead Act, Suttonville had boomed from a typical cow town to a bustling trade point for the government and the treatied Indians. At first, Brock feared that all the extra commerce could turn Suttonville into another Dodge City, the Gomorrah of the Plains. Not even the hot guns like Earp and Masterton could keep a rein on that hellhole. But this close to Fort Benteen, Suttonville kept its true face. Sure, Brock would get some trouble now and again, a little rustling, a bad lynching or two, a panner trying to pass pyrite as gold. There were plenty of Saturday night fights, too, but Brock had never had a problem handling any of it. Indeed, Suttonville was as fine a town as he could ever hope for.

Until this morning.

He’d seen his share of atrocity in his time. First, the War, of course. After his discharge, he’d worked for Pinkerton’s, and there’d been that dock strike in Portsmouth. Five men hung upside down from trammels, their bellies opened by a hay knife. The smell was extraordinary, and the way their innards looked lying on the floor defied description. Brock had also witnessed a number of lynching victims days after the event: bodies the size of cattle via gas distension. Then there was the time when Brock served as a Centralia deputy sheriff in the Missouri Territories; he discovered a range brothel where all the women had been branded to death. Just for the hell of it, Brock realized. They’d each been tied down, breasts and faces cooked off, red-hot pokers teased into vaginas and rectums. Brock stood appalled as the lingering stench of baked shit swept into his nostrils. Madness…When he’d caught the men responsible—two escapees from Gallatin federal stockade—he’d gutshot them both with his Winchester 73, let them lie there and caterwaul for an hour till they died.

All that…

But now this.

Brock had never seen anything like this.

All his life, he’d believed in God. Now he believed in the Devil. Only the Devil or one of his acolytes could have ministered to that which Brock witnessed at the Bowen Place this morning. One of Nale’s boys had come to fetch him. When Brock had walked in…

The images assailed him again. He nearly collapsed to his knees in the street.

He couldn’t think of it.

Should he go back to Mary and her sod house, pungent with the malodor of old sperm? But if he did, how long would the reprise of distraction last? Minutes, he realized. Or perhaps he should go to the saloon and blanch his memory with whiskey. But he couldn’t do that either, in case Doc called for him.

There was no escaping his memory…

No getting away from it. I have a job to do, and good people depending on me.

Dust rose behind his rawhide boots as he strode for the jail.

The man he and Clyde Nale had found in the Bowen Place now lay perfectly still on the rope cot in the first jail cell.

Brock’s vision seemed to shift as he peered in.

The man looked just plain…odd.

Brock got a chill—and an impression that he was looking at a corpse.

Almost as skinny as some of the men Brock had seen at Andersonville. Short hair and a long thin face. Trousers and shirt made of a funny-lookin’ fabric that made Brock think of city folk.

“Still nothing,” Doc Hall said, coming down the jail corridor. “No movement, and not a word.”

Brock continued to gaze fixedly through the bars. “You sure he ain’t dead?”

The lean doctor ran a finger through one of his great muttonchop sideburns. Perplexion drew runnels across his bald pate. “He blinks, and his heartbeat’s normal. Normal respiratory expansion and pupillary dilation. It’s the strangest case of catatonia I’ve ever seen.”

Brock smirked at the doctor’s lexicon. “Come on, Doc. All that fancy medical talk don’t do me no good. What’cha reckon happened to him?”

“It’s impossible to say, Sheriff. During my internship in Boston, we’d make weekly rounds at the sanatorium to examine the most immoderate mental cases. Some of the elderly victims of what’s known as dementia praecox would often lapse into comas—but nothing like this.”

Brock smirked again. Auto…WHAT? Dementia peacock?

“The heart rate would plummet, autonomic responses would drop to practically nothing. What I’m trying to tell you is that, based on my examination, I can find no clinical reason for this man to be unconscious.”

“And you say he could be in this here coma—”

“For years,” Doc Hall answered.

“Years, huh? Well, I ain’t got years and neither has justice.” Brock looked Doc Hall square in the eye. “You and I both know that the man in that cell is the one who kilt the Bowens, and there ain’t a judge in the entire country who’d see otherwise. There ain’t gonna be no waitin’ years for that skinny murderer to git what he deserves.”

Hall raised a brow that might be considered a gesture of criticism. “You don’t know that, Sheriff. And if ya want my medical opinion, I don’t see how a man—’specially a man as slight as him—could’ve done those things to them people. Don’t see how any man could.”

Brock’s memory drifted back to the scene he’d witnessed hours earlier when he’d walked into the Bowen house…

Chester Bowen—a well-respected farmer in his forties—lay sprawled on his back before the family’s cherry wood hope chest. He was fully naked. From his mouth hung a long plume of some unidentifiable material, glistening wet. Doc Hall later ascertained that this “material” was Chester Bowen’s innards: stomach, heart, lungs—everything. In addition, his sexual parts were not in evidence betwixt his legs. Ripped right out of his groin, it seemed. It was Clyde Nale who later noticed them in Bowen’s own clawed hand.

Mrs. Bowen was worse—far worse. At first, neither Brock nor Clyde Nale could speak when they saw the perfectly clean skeleton settled in the corner by the pot-bellied stove. If it were Dora Bowen, she must’ve died months ago for that’s how long it would take for a corpse to decompose so completely—yet Brock had greeted her himself just two days ago buying a trivet and some treenware at the general store. When Clyde had glanced behind the grinding quern…

That’s when he’d run out of the house, shouting for God’s protection.

Brock had taken a glance himself, and just gaped.

Two eyes sat atop a stagnant pile of flesh, something like a stretched face settled in the middle of the mass.

The shock and revulsion pinned Brock to the tabby-brick wall. He would’ve run out of there himself but…

The girl, he remembered. The little girl…

The Bowens had a daughter—Kelly Ann, not but six years old. Brock knew he was no man at all if he ran out now. I’ve got to find her, he vowed, even as his stomach convulsed. She might still be alive…

Brock found her in the loft.

She was not still alive.

She’d been splayed out naked on the floor, her breastless chest the hue of candle wax, her little legs parted so extremely that the hip joints must surely be dislocated or broken. Her small jaw, too, appeared dislocated as if pried apart in order to force something huge down her throat. And her privates—

Brock cut off the rest of the memory, biting his lip till he tasted blood, his eyes squeezed shut.

When he opened them again, he was looking back at the bizarre man unconscious in the jail cell.

What had Doc Hall been saying? “I don’t see how a man—’specially a man as slight as him—could’ve done those things to them people. Don’t see how any man could.”

“No, Doc, maybe not a typical man,” Brock returned to the conversation. “But how about a man in league with Lucifer?”

Doc Hall frowned but bid no comment.

“Come on, Doc. You saw them bodies. You saw what he done to ’em. It’s the Devil’s work if there ever was.” Brock jabbed a finger at the jail cell’s motionless occupant. “And that fella there? He’s surely an acolyte of the Devil.”

They sat up front in the sheriff’s room, sipping coffee from tin cups, Brock ringing the spittoon every few minutes. He knew Doc Hall wasn’t pleased, just as he knew the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were noble pieces of work which granted that all men, ’cept niggrahs, was created equal and due certain inalienable rights. Brock, in fact, believed that niggrahs was too, just like President Lincoln had said, and he strongly disapproved of lynchings.

All men accused of a crime were entitled to a trial by a jury of their peers.

But not Devilers, Brock thought, and not injuns neither.

“If he doesn’t come out of the coma,” Doc Hall broke the silence, “then ya don’t have to worry about it. He’ll starve to death by the time ya report it to the governor’s office. Ya only got to worry about a trial if he does come out of it. Just as I was sayin’ earlier, some comas last for years. But some only hours.”

“Hours, huh?” Brock spat another plume of juice into the spittoon. “You don’t get it, do ya, Doc? I ain’t sittin’ here waitin’ for him ta wake up. I’m just waitin’ for sundown. Coma or not, once it’s dark, I’m ridin’ him out to Tunstall Gulch—” Brock raised his Colt Model 62, 44-40—“where I’ll shoot him proper’n leave him fer the buzzards.”

“Ya can’t do that, Sheriff,” Hall warned. “It ain’t right.”

“Tell that to the Bowens. Tell that to that little girl.”

“He deserves a fair trial!”

Brock rested back against his chair, his rawhide boots up on the desk. “He’s a deviler, pure’n simple. Folks’d ask questions if there was a trial. That’s why I got my deputy and some men buryin’ the bodies right now. We’ll say it was typhoid.”

“But it wasn’t typhoid!” Hall yelled.

But Brock yelled back, louder, “To give that man a fair trial, I’d have to ride clear to the Collier County seat to fetch a judge! And a trial like this? The town’d be cursed. Just like Salem! We’d never live down the rumors of deviltry. Folks’d move away, to California or down south. There’d be nothing left. We’d be a ghost town in a year!”

The two men stared each other down.

“So that’s the story,” Brock said more quietly. “Typhoid is what kilt the Bowens. And you’ll verify it ta anyone who asks.”

Hall simmered. “And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, I call in the U.S. Marshals from Springfield. They’ll be very interested in what’cha been doin’ on the side. What’s the word? Abortion? Same as killin’ babies is the way the government sees it. Don’t think I don’t know about that, Doc.”

Hall’s face paled.

“Best we just stay friends’n you see things my way, huh?”

“Typhoid, yes,” Hall muttered. “A family out in the hills, no chance of contagion to the rest of the town. Expeditious burial…was the only course of action.”

Brock nodded, took another bite out of his plug. He set a bottle of sour mash on the desk and two glasses. “Now while I’m pourin’ us a drink, why don’t you go take a peek in on our guest? See if he’s still in this coma’re not.”

Deviler, he thought

Kansas whiskey wasn’t nothing like what they made in Kentucky and Tennessee, but it was good enough for Brock. He belted three neat shots in a row to help take some of the edge off of the day. Half-drunk, he figured, was a fine state to be in when he wagoned his convict out to the gulch and gutshot him, watched him bleed out slow, real slow. In the War, Brock had seen many a man die in howling agony from gutshots; they’d shriek in the field for hours. That’s what Brock would do to this man. Then a final 44-40 shot to that gaunt face.

Job done. Justice served.

And God avenged.

Deviler…

There was no place in the Lord’s domain, nor in Brock’s town, for such an emissary of evil. Brock’s gun would do God’s work.

He was about to pour himself another shot when…

Holy—WHAT!

A smell, quite rich, drifted into the room. Brock’s nose crinkled when he sniffed.

Smells like…shit…

And the smell was coming from the jail room.

Brock was up and striding across the floorboards, thoroughly addled. When he stepped into the hall and took another sniff, his suspicions were confirmed—doubly. The odor of fresh excrement slapped him in the face. “Hey, Doc!” he called out. “What’s going on back here? That fella in the cell up’n shit hisself?”

This seemed the only logical explanation…but when Brock turned the corner and faced the jail hall, what he saw was not logical at all. It was insane.

It was deviltry.

Doc Hall’s trousers had been ripped clean off, and he was being pressed face-first against the wall. What was pressing him, though, was a long, fat hose-like thing which had reached through the bars of the jail cell and had girded about the doctor’s waist. Brock, in spite of his horror, knew what the thing was.

A demon’s tail, he thought, staring.

The tail of a serpent from Hell.

He only saw it for a moment but a moment was enough. Doc Hall, in a second of deranged realization, looked over his trembling shoulder to glance helplessly at Brock.

But the doctor’s eyeballs had already come unseated from their sockets. They dangled against his cheeks by nerves.

Hall’s excrement was freely dropping from his anus to the floor, where a considerable pile had already amassed.

Brock had no choice but to conclude: A-A-A demon’s got its tail wrapped ’round the Doc’s belly’n it’s squeezin’ all the shit out of him!

In the next second, the tail constricted more tightly, and when no more feces could be squeezed out, out came the doctor’s entire intestinal tract. And in the second after that, Hall was released, collapsing dead to the dusty floor as the tail withdrew back into the cell.

Brock’s psyche shattered. He could not much calculate beyond the basics of observation. There was deviltry afoot, all right—just as he’d suspected—and he knew that when he looked into that cell, he would find a devil.

He drew his long Colt pistol, cocked the hammer. Then he stepped fully into the hallway and turned to face the first jail cell.

“My period of inactivity, quite aimlessly misdiagnosed by the good doctor, was not an aspect of catatonia at all,” a snide snippish voice told him. “It was instead a necessary component of sensory transfer based on, one, the limitations of the human body and, two, the accommodating time-effect of such a transfer of information.”

Brock stood stock-still, staring in. He expected to find a demon in full incarnation: horns, fangs, taloned hands, and the great python-like tail. But all that faced him, standing now, was the thin, oddly dressed man he’d locked up in there several hours ago.

Brock was speechless.

“My master is quite smarter than yours,” the gaunt-faced man said next. “It’s merely an assimilation of informational synergy as a form of resolute action. It’s all transitive mathematics, in a sense, and elemental malleability. Identifying a transpositional point of valence is rather simple; it all boils down to the exploitation of a particular atom with the capacity of forming a single bond with hydrogen, which then allows a transposition of time with regard to a selected physical mass—such as a human body. Past, present, and future, then, are wielded as effectively as a juggler’s pins. Do you understand?”

Brock did not understand. All he understood was that a devil stood in his midst. “Demon,” he croaked. “Get thee behind me.” Then he raised his Colt pistol.

The man in the cell smirked. “You’re not listening. I’ve just told you that time can be manipulated. Hence, so can energy. See? Brainwaves function via energy, and that colloquial force we think of as human will is derived via the function of brainwaves.” The man’s shoulders shrugged. “Time travel, immortality, physical transfiguration—it’s all elemental physics. If a proton ceases to move at the speed of light, the proton ceases to exist.”

Brock’s finger began to squeeze the trigger, but before the action could be completed, the pistol turned into something like black vapor, and had disappeared in a fraction of a second.

Then the cell’s iron bars disappeared too.

Brock stuttered, “Yea, though I walk in the valley of death, I fear no…”

“What you perceive as sorcery is actually only simple science,” the prisoner said. “But all beings evolve at their own rate. You’re right about one thing, however. Evil, though you pray not to fear it. It’s the only one thing that’s relative everywhere.”

Brock swallowed hard.

“Evil,” the man said. He stepped out of the cell. Brock wanted to run but now found himself completely immobile.

“God, save me,” he prayed.

“Not God,” the man said. “Yog-Suthoth.”

March 15, 2000

Cooper looked down into the opened coffin and saw—

The fuck?

—nothing.

The coffin was empty.

“It’s true,” Fichnik said. “It’s all true.”

Cooper was pissed; he didn’t like not knowing what the fuck was going on. Empty coffin? Big money paid to move it? Where was the body?

He crawled up in the dirt. Hadn’t Fichnik said he knew something about the deceased? Cooper, in his lackadaisy, had forgotten the name of the decedent. He kneed back over to the stone, and began to push the machine-tilled dirt away from the base.

Dates began to appear in stark gothic numerals: 1890-1937.

Then he brushed more of the dirt away, and letters appeared: HOWARD PHIL—

But Fichnik’s next outburst tore Cooper’s attention away from the stone before he could read it all.

“It worked! It worked!”

Cooper stood up from the dirt and glared. “What are you talking about? There’s a body missing from this box…and I got a funny feeling you know something about it. So start talking, or start getting your fat ass kicked.”

“But of course, you don’t understand,” the portly man asserted. “He was the senior envoy of our plight. It’s not a plight by choice. It’s by design. Don’t you see?”

“All I see,” Cooper said, “is a fat Twinkie about to get his cream filling knocked out of him.”

Was it a sudden movement of cloud cover, or did Fichnik’s face physically darken? “Your God seeks reverence. Ours merely seeks experience, the excitement of the spectacle of agony, or horror and despair—the human species at its truest. They’ll be here soon, and they’re using us to scout the land, so to speak.”

Cooper cocked a funky brow.

“Our gods want to taste your world,” Fichnik said, “…and we are the tongues.”

“I’m calling Providence PD,” Cooper assured. “Let them figure this out, ya fat whack.”

“No, son,” Fichnik said, casting a revered glance down to the opened grave. “All times, all places—that is our sojourn. It’s all about this: the exploitation of a particular atom with the capacity of forming a single bond with hydrogen, which then allows a transposition of time with regard to a selected physical mass—such as a human body.”

Cooper stared—

—and suddenly he was being strangled. Just as his breath ran out, he calculated what he’d seen. A great trunk-like thing had ejected from Fichnick’s mouth and had wrapped around him, and now that same thing was slipping down to Cooper’s waist.

No more death metal rang in his head. Just death.

His final thought was that the trunk-like mass seemed like the tail of a demon. But as he died, vomiting and defecating his internal organs—and was then thrown into the opened casket—he realized it was more like a tentacle.

CHEF

It tastes kind of like pork, if you cook it right. Low heat in the oven, or else it dries out. Pan frying depends on what you’re cooking; like with venison, you have to add a little light oil or you’ll wind up with a chop that’s sinewy.

And when you’re broiling? Six, seven inches from the element at least. Any closer and all the fat drains.

Come on in, don’t worry. Nobody’ll see you back here with me. Just come on in through the back door. Ain’t nobody uses the back door but me, lemme tell ya.

Living on the street, huh? Well, I can relate to that, partner. Lived on the street awhile myself before I lucked into this gig. Give me a sec and I’ll get ya some grub. Plenty of it around here, lemme tell ya.

Call me Chef. That’s what I’ve been called for years because, well, that’s what I am. I was executive chef at the Emerald Room, eight goddamn years. Best restaurant on the City Dock, and, man, could I do it up. You ever been there? Like from eighty-five to ninety-three? If you ever had the pan-fried Louisiana shrimp cakes, the Jack Daniels shrimp, the bay scallops in whiskey cream—well, that was me. I about invented Eastern Shore lobster fritters; the reason mine are best is the dipping sauce, a little sweet-baked garlic and about a teaspoon of poached roe from the carapace. Nothing like ’em. My filet mignon will melt in your mouth, and if you’d ever had the chance to try my Flaming Mad Nero Crepes or my veal porcini, you’d shit your pants. Four-star reviews three years in a row, babe, and, no, we didn’t grease the critics like a lotta these busted humps. It was me that made the Emerald Room famous for the finest cuisine in town.

And now…

You should try my stuff now.

See, I’m a grub. You’ve heard of us.

People call us grubs same as they call blacks niggers and Pakistanis towelheads. Oh, sure, everyone says they respect our rights as human beings, but that’s just the same old shit. I read in Newsweek there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don’t know, a year or so ago? Don’t tell me you never heard about that. NASA and the Air Force were testing some new kind of airplane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. They called it a nuclear ramjet or some shit, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, run by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. “The ultimate deterrent,” the President said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this thing. First time the Democrats and Republicans ever agreed on anything. The Senate got this thing passed in one day; everybody from Trent Lott to Ted Fuckin’ Kennedy said it was gonna trim a hundred billion a year off the deficit. Was gonna create jobs, lower inflation, reduce the federal budget, blah, blah, blah. What they didn’t announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn’t worried about it cos it flew so high, the shit would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something fucked up during one of the test flights, and one of these ramjet planes wound up flying up and down the East Coast at treetop level on something they called an “emergency urban alert bomb mode” for like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for shit’s sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get zapped.

Anyway, it was about one a.m. and I’d just gotten off shift at the Emerald Room. A good night, we’d served about two hundred dinners, and all the customers were raving about my specials. Some critic from the Post said my chateaubriand was the best he’d ever had. Like I said, a good night. So I’m hoofing home down West Street, and then there’s this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly thing flying about a hundred feet over my head. Didn’t know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it passed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. I died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.

There was a big whoop-de-do for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the fuck hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some shit. Oh, you should’ve heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna “euthanize” us is what McCaine said, “to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications,” until some egghead at CDC verified that we were weren’t psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then that asshole Helms made a big pitch about how we should be “socially impounded.” “Protean symptomologies,” see, that’s what they were worried about. These shitheads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be. Then the Senate wanted to prove they were sincere—it was election year, see, and they needed more seats—and they got a special bill passed, the Ramjet Anti-Discrimination Disability Bill, they called it, so all of us grubs get a couple hundred per month to make up for things. There’s also an Anti-Discrimination Act, and a Ramjet Victim Affirmative Action Act. It’s against the law for employers to not hire us just because we’re grubs, but you know how that goes. They’ll just think up some other reason not to hire you, and all we’re left with are the really shit jobs.

I don’t need the disability dough myself—I was one of the few who got lucky. The Emerald Room fired me right away, made up some shit about me being late. Real reason is they didn’t want word getting around that a grub was working the range. Bad for business. I mean, who’s gonna drop a three-hundred-dollar check when they know it’s a dead guy cooking their entrees? And—

’Scuse me a sec. I just got an order for Three-Flavor Ceviche and a Clam Panzerotti…

After the Emerald Room gave me the boot, I had to rough it for a while. Lot of us were living in the street, but there wasn’t no way I was gonna let this shit drag me down. I applied for jobs everywhere. I mean, Christ, with my credentials and experience? I’ve been reviewed in the Washingtonian, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been interviewed in every goddamn cuisine mag published, and one time Gourmet did a feature on me, and ran a lot of the recipes of my specials.

Of course, I got new specials now.

’Scuse me again. My blackened prime rib is up.

Look, all I ask is you wait a minute before you judge me, okay? The way I see it is grubs got rights too. Just because we’re dead don’t mean we ain’t people. We got hopes and dreams just like you. We want the same things everyone wants, and we work just as hard as the next guy but we get the shit-end of the stick every time cos we’re grubs. If you were a grub you’d know what I’m talking about. Now I know what it’s like to be a minority. Never much thought about it back when I was alive, but now I can relate to what it feels like to be black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, gay, whatever. People are just so fuckin’ phony. They put laws on the books to protect our rights but it don’t mean shit. Try being a grub and just walk down the street. People gape at you, people get out of the way. They’ll cross the fuckin’ street so they don’t have to walk the same side, like we’re lepers or something. And there’re plenty of scumbag bigot bozos out there who just plain hate your guts because of what you are. They’ll spit on you, they’ll drag you in an alley and kick your ass, they’ll try to run you down if you’re hitching a ride. Sometimes you just get sick of it.

And you wanna do something about it.

I guess I got a little off track, huh? Back to what I was saying. I really lucked out, I gotta decent job again, cheffing at a good restaurant. I gotta come in and leave through the back door, but what the fuck, a job’s a job. The management is real good about keeping a lid on me—the customers don’t know I’m a grub. And this new joint I’m cheffing in?

Rave fuckin’ reviews, man. The place was no big deal before I came on, but now it’s got a rep and a half. The reviews are even better than when I was at the Emerald. It’s a packed house every night. You wanna eat here, brother, you better make a reservation a month in advance, and I don’t mind telling you it’s all because of me, my expertise as a world-class master chef. They sure as shit ain’t filling the house every night because of the pretty table cloths. They want the best food in the city and they know they can get it here. My menu, my specials.

And…you know the old saying.

What people don’t know won’t hurt ’em.

Shit, give me another sec. I gotta get this pot-au-feu of cured duck off the line, and this order of Michelangelo peppers. Try ’em some time. Primo, chief. You’d write home about my Michelangelo peppers.

Anyway, back to what I was saying before. When people put you down long enough, you just get sick of it. You just wanna rise up and take back what they’ve ripped off of you. But I’m just one grub—what can I do? What, start a secret militia? Start a grub revolution? Don’t make me laugh. They’d snuff my ass in two seconds if I even started talking shit like that.

Hey, pass me that little dish of thyme, will ya? And that bucket of mustard vinaigrette. Thanks.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. You get shit on long enough, you wanna do something about it. But one day I realized there was nothing I could do outside of myself. I ain’t gonna form some grub union. I ain’t gonna start some terrorist organization. They’d chuck us into the grub slam faster than it takes you to wipe your ass. I realized that if I wanted to rebel, I’d have to find a way to do it secretly, by myself…

That first fucker, let me tell ya. I’m walking to work one afternoon, crossing First Street, and this redneck motherfucker gets right up in my face. Shoving me, pointing his finger at me, shouting all kinds of shit, man. “Get your dead ass out of town, grub!” he yells at me. “You stink! You’re dirty! Nobody wants your kind here!” And there’s other people standing around him, and you know what they do? They start clapping, like this guy’s some kind of hero for breaking my chops. Then the fucker spits in my face, and I know I can’t fight back cos if I do, I’m in the joint just like that. If you’re a grub and you hit someone, your ass is grass. They have special cellblocks for us is what I heard. Anyway, this chump hocks the lunger in my face, laughs, and then he crosses the street and gets in his car and drives away. Just like that.

You wanna know what I did?

I got his fuckin’ tag number, that’s what I did.

I kill them, that’s right. You would too if you had to take the shit I take every fuckin’ day. Of course, I’m really careful about it, I’m no dumbbell. Some asshole gets on my case for being a grub, I’ll wait a week, then I’ll punch his ticket when the time is right. One day the resident manager of my apartment building stops by, says he’s gotta triple my rent cos me living there is making other residents move. Well, I let it slide. And a week later the guy disappears.

I walk into the gourmet shop on Wisconsin Ave one day, and the fat shit behind the counter starts raising hell, tells me to get out of his shop, doesn’t want me stinking up the place. I’m gonna drive customers away if people see a grub shopping in his two-bit joint. I just smiled and left.

And about a week later the Jabba-the-Hut-looking fat fuck disappears.

I’ve checked out about a dozen of them so far. That’s right, my own little revolution.

Ooo-la-la. Waitress just gave me an order for tartar provencial. I serve it with ossetra caviar, capers, green onions, and chopped egg whites. Stuff’ll make your mouth water, bub.

What was it I was saying?

No, no, and I don’t just leave the bodies there—I told you, they disappear. And I sure as shit don’t bury them either.

I guess by now you’re figuring out exactly what I do with them, huh?

A good chef can make anything taste like something else. Out on the dining floor, we got our regular menu, but in my head, see, I got my own menu.

My vinegar-accented lamb vindaloo—it ain’t lamb, brother, I can tell ya that. Try my foie gras pastry or my pâté on toast points. Who needs goose liver? My spit-roasted chicken in tarragon jus? Guess where the jus comes from.

The muscle meats taste like pork, great for stews, stuffing stock and andouille sausage, flaming stir-fry. I’ll grind up some biceps and blend it with bay oysters and my special garlic croutons, and that’s the way to stuff braised duck, man. When people order my fabulous Lebanon kabob, it ain’t no tender chunks of lamb on that spike, and I can tell you something else, too. The human abdominal wall makes for the best brisket of beef you ever had in your fuckin’ life.

So you see what I mean when I said I’m doing my own little revolution. I’m feeding these assholes to the assholes out there, and they’re loving it. You should see them coming in every night with their eight-hundred-dollar suits and their smug faces and distinguished gray temples. When these fuckers order the roast tenderloin of lamb, they’re really getting my roast tenderloin of scumbag. And the crusted flaky baguette of rabbit? Try crusted flaky baguette of Clyde. And my dry-baked ribs? I’ll bet you’d swear they were the best ribs you ever had.

And don’t even ask about the black truffle risotto and veal sweetbreads.

Yeah, you name it, I got it. Butt-meat brioche with saffron. Tagliarini ravioli stuffed with chopped bowel and roasted pearl onions. Sliced tongue in bell pepper curry sauté. Eggplant and testicle puree, bacon-sprinkled poached brain pudding, and crispy dick skin cordon bleu.

The fuckers can’t get enough.

Oh, yeah. I never did tell you exactly where I work, did I? That’s the best part about my little revolution.

I filled out one of those Anti-Discrimination Protection Act forms, and applied with the same bunch of two-faced, phony cocksuckers who started all this shit.

Yeah, that’s right, partner. I’m the head chef at the United States Senate Dining Room.

And—how do you like that!

Some poor fucker just ordered my first-class chimol tossed headcheese salad.

EVER NAT

Gray had seen the girl hitching down the route several nights in a row. Purebred redneck, he could tell, but…Christ, she’s cute. Faded cutoffs, halter top, sleek bare legs flashing in his headlights as she trod the road’s gravel edge. He’d read in the county section that prostitutes were known to hitch on the route…

Gray worked in the city: 125 K a year now, assistant programming director for UniCorp. Not bad for 40. And switching him to four-to-twelves dropped another ten percent in his pocket as a night differential. The adjustment came easy: fewer people in the office, fewer distractions and ringing phones—more time to work. Gray had no wife anymore and had never really cared about a social life; the way he saw it, work was the only way to make anything of himself. And I have, he thought now. His car, in part, was proof. An onyx-black Callaway Twin Turbo Corvette: sixty grand. A fifteen-thousand-dollar VTL/Apogee stereo at home. And home wasn’t shabby either, a three-bedroom luxury condo, waterfront. The good things in life—that’s what he worked for…

But at times like this, during these incalculable drives, he got to wondering. What else is there? Good question after two marriages and two divorces, plus the handful of nickel-dime relationships in between. Women always wanted something, at least it seemed to him. Like I owe them a life in exchange for sex once a week. He’d had it up with the whole ball of wax. I don’t need a woman in my life, he considered, comfortable behind the padded wheel. All I need is me…

But was that really true?

There were other needs.

Four-to-twelves had one more perk: no rush hour. Gray left the city at midnight, then took the route to the interstate. With no traffic, he’d be back to his condo in less than a half hour. State Route 154 was a long winding flood emergency route through the dense woodland of South County. It was a pretty drive, scenic—especially at night, especially during the summer. The low moon followed him through the trees. Crickets and peepers issued their steady, pulsating cacophony, and the stars glimmered like luminous spillage in the sky.

And here she was again. The girl he’d seen hitchhiking several nights in a row. The girl, and that rising need.

Yes, he’d read in the paper that prostitutes often walked the route, but not like the hookers in the city—they were all drug addicts, scary in their empty-eyed stares and sleazy getups. These route girls, he’d heard, were just poor rubes—white trash, for the most part—looking to make a few bucks to take back to their broken farms. And this one here?

Just last night he’d passed her, hadn’t he? She’d been walking just past the bend, and when Gray spotted her, something in his soul seized up. That trampy, hick beauty glared back in the swoosh of halogen high beams; a freeze-frame locked in his head.

Oh, man…

All slim curves and fine lines. Frayed cutoffs satcheled sleek, spread hips. Pert breasts, large for a girl of her delicate frame, swayed braless in the faded orange halter, and between that and her beltline, Gray lost his breath at the image of her tight, sloping abdomen and the tiny slit of bellybutton. Her face seemed to beam bright as the halogens: big brown eyes; a small, robust mouth; a peaches-and-cream complexion.

Hair the color of mature straw danced at her shoulders.

And all these details, yes, he’d managed to assess in the split-second glimpse as his Corvette rounded the bend. But one more detail nicked at him, more persistent than the others, and the detail was this: Her tanned arm extended, her thumb out.

Pick her up, he thought. Maybe she’ll…

Maybe she’ll what? Proposition you?

Was that what he was looking for?

The answer must’ve been yes, because a few tenths of a mile later, Gray was pulling a U. His heart seemed to pick up in its beat as he drove, scanning the lit shoulder. But—

Goddamn it!

When he got back to the bend, another car idled at the line—a nicely refurbed ’68 Camaro, ice white. It was a small block, with headers and chambered exhaust. Gray could tell by the healthy chunk-chunk-chunk of the idle. But something in his spirit seemed to collapse when he saw…

The girl was getting in. A final passing glimpse showed him the driver’s face in the left window, some stubbled, long-haired redneck. Goddamn rube probably changes tires for a living, Gray thought in disgust.

So that was the end of that. Or—

Maybe not.

Here she was again, tonight, hitching along the same shoulder, barefoot, long tan legs stepping backward as she jerked her thumb out.

Pick her up…

It was something like a haze in his eyes when he pulled the Corvette right over. A shadow danced in his rearview, and then the passenger door was opening. The shadow slipped in, bringing a faintly musky scent in its wake. The door slunked shut.

“Hi,” Gray said.

“Ha,” she replied. That’s what her redneck dialect turned the word “hi” into. “Wow, this, I say, this is some really nass car.”

Nass? he thought, but then he considered the dialect again. She was saying nice.

“Thanks. So where you headed?”

“Tylersville, I means, if ya kin go alls that way. Youse kin drops me off ’fore the highway ramp if ya’s cain’t go that far.”

Fuck. Tylersville was all the way at the end of the route, close to ten miles probably.

“Sure,” he agreed. What else have I got to do? Gray thought. Go home? Catch the end of Leno? “It’s not that far out of my way.”

“Thank-ya, and I’se sorry if I smell like crabs.”

The comment took him aback. “Smell like what?”

“Likes crabs. See, I’se work for Stevenson’s Crabbers. They’se got a shack just up the route. That’s where I’se walkin’ home from juss now. I’se a crab-picker. See, they’se buy crabs by the bushel down the City Dock, and we’s pick all the meat out of ’em and put it in containers ta sells ta the city restaurants so they’se can make crabcakes’n newburg’n stuff. Pay’s not bad, eithers—fifty cent over minimum wage.”

What was that? About seven bucks an hour to pick crabs in some sweatshop all day. I make that much in about five minutes, he thought.

“Sounds like, uh, an interesting job.”

“Ak-shure-lee it kinda sucks,” she admitted, “but I gots a baby an’ I don’t wanna go on the welfare.”

“Well, that’s, uh, that’s very commendable of you,” Gray struggled for a reply.

“An’, ya know, you’ll’se see me hitchin’ home from there this time most ever nat.”

Ever nat? Gray tried to decipher and remembered yet again the dialect. Ever nat. Every night.

“Yeah, I, you know, I think I saw you last night, but—”

“I saws you too. Ain’t no way I’d ferget a nice car like this. Wish ya’d picked me up, thoughs, cos the guy who did, it was this real cracker inna white Camaro. He weren’t very nice.”

Gray searched for a comment. What did she mean? But before he could think of something…

“’Corse I do more’n pick crabs fer money, ya know.”

Silence. Gray drove with it. It was like a companion riding in the backseat, a preceptor sitting there and waiting to see how he would gauge and then react to the remark.

This was the moment, wasn’t it? Put up or shut up.

His groin, suddenly, felt like some burgeoning thing, a husky, drooling animal dragging him around. He couldn’t control it. He hadn’t really even looked at her since she’d gotten into the car, yet something about her seemed to emanate: the musky, perspiry scent, the gentle drawl of her voice, the way her lithe shadow played on the dashboard.

“An’ I guess you knows what I’se talkin’ ’bout,” she went on unabashed, “’n’less that’s, like, a summer squash ya gots there in yer pants.”

Gray, in spite of his nervousness, almost belted out a loud laugh. It reminded him of old high school jokes. Is that the Loch Ness Monster in your pants, or are you just happy to see me? Shit. Some summer squash. Six and a quarter inches, and that was on a good day. But it was time, wasn’t it? Time to get down to business.

“I’m not a cop or anything,” he felt the impulse to offer. Didn’t they usually ask that first? He’d seen it on the cop shows and in the movies. If they asked and a decoy cop said no, there was some entrapment law they’d be violating? Gray wasn’t sure.

“Oh, I know you ain’t no cop,” she said and laughed lightly. “Cops don’t drive cars like this! ’Sides, I kin tell youse’re a nass guy.”

Hmm. So. I’m a nass guy.

“Well, thank you for saying so,” he said. “You’re a nice girl.”

“And I’se kin tell ya, cops ’round these parts? They ain’t nass. ’Specially them county sheriffs. They ain’t nass at all.”

Gray didn’t know what to say. He was too excited to pursue small talk. The pause that followed sounded hollow, mixed with the big engine’s soft hum. He gulped and continued, “So, like how much money are we talking here, and, you know…for what?”

Her voice didn’t hitch. “I’ll’se give ya a good blow job fer, like, ten bucks, if you’ll drive me alls the way home.”

Ten bucks? Christ. Gray was about to offer a hundred. He fished in his pocket—there was a twenty in there somewhere. He grabbed some haphazard bills and gave them to her.

“I don’t know what that is,” he said. “Twenty, thirty, something like that. You can have it.”

“Dag, mister!” Her nimble hands counted the bills in the moonlight on the dash. “This here’s twennie, not ten. Plus a five.”

“You can have it, you know, for—”

The feel of her hand on his groin silenced him. At first it felt as though a little bird had landed there, but then the bird gave a soft rub and then a harder squeeze. Gray nearly came.

Her lilting voice hushed as she leaned over. The hand rubbed him more intricately. “I mean, I don’t wants ya ta think I’m juss some whore’re anything. But I’se never seed nothing wrong with a gal taking some money long’s she’s willing ta give something’n return. Ya know? Mue-cher-all agreement.”

Gray’s breath lodged in his chest. “I…agree…”

“Tells ya what,” she whispered. Now her face was so close to his crotch, he could almost feel her breath on it. “Youse juss keep yer hands on the wheel an’ con-ser-trates on yer drivin’, an’ I’ll’se do the rest.”

Gray gulped, nodded mutely.

He felt his buckle come undone, then heard the rasp of his zipper. A sweet shock seemed to tremor, then, when he felt her fingers push his slacks down and then pry out his scrotum and already hard penis. She gently squeezed his balls, and, next, harder, she squeezed the shaft. Gray felt a small reservoir of pre-ejaculate form at the glans.

“Youse juss drives me all the way down the route. Turn left on 3 ta Tylersville, an’ I’se’ll suck ya the whole way.”

Gray was about to come right now, not ten miles from now, and she hadn’t even taken it into her mouth. I don’t think…I’ll quite…last that…long, he thought, his teeth grinding.

Her right hand cupped his balls as her mouth sucked, first the glans, then took the whole thing—all six and a quarter inches—down to the back of her throat. Gray’s cock suddenly felt cocooned in a hot, wet gulf. At the base, her lips constricted to a tight O, then drew up. This was expert, this was phenomenal. That delectable wet O drew up and down again, up and down—

Thinking about baseball worked to a point, a destructive distraction. Each time he forced an image into his head—Clemens’ twenty-second win or A-Rod’s post-season record breaker—Gray’s orgasm was staved off for a moment. But he gnashed his teeth in objection—inviting such imagery seemed a horrible vandalism to the sensation. He wanted the sensation to be extended, though; hence, a brutal cycle of sabotage. He’d turn the image off and was about to come, so he turned it right back on: Swisher, Jeter, Texiera, etc. Aw, Jesus! When he summoned the image of C.C. Sabathia’s face, his erection nearly died.

“Mmm, yeah,” the girl paused to say. “You’re lastin’ a good long while. I wouldn’t mind ya fuckin’ me, neithers. Bet’cha’d make me come.”

She slowly jacked it with her hand a few times, fingers playing over slick spit. Gray had to keep his eyes ludicrously wide on the road.

“I don’t mind suckin’ fellas off,” she drawled on. “It’s kind’a fun.” She squeezed more crystal ooze out of the tip, then played her thumb over it. Gray fidgeted sharply in the seat.

“And you ain’t like a lotta guys.” More talk, more hand-play. “You know? Lotta guys talk real nasty while I’m doin’ it, sayin’ mean stuff. Like that fella last night? Kept callin’ me pig’n bitch’n whore, sayin’ ‘suck that cock, ya little whore’ and stuff like that.”

Gray’s legs were tremoring; he had trouble keeping his right foot controlled over the gas. “That’s, uh,” he gasped. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“Naw, but you are.”

Her voice was erotic—that drawl, half innocence, half experience. Sabathia’s psychological wreckage disappeared, and Gray was hard again, hard as metal pipe. She’d squeeze against the nerve-charged rigidity, slide her hand up, slide her hand down, with painstaking slowness. A few more times like that and he’d come all over himself, probably squirt himself in the face. But just when that would happen, she let go and massaged his balls. Gray was definitely getting his money’s worth.

She seemed to be considering something when she said, “Awright, I know what I’ll do. But I don’t usually do it, just so ya’s know.”

Gray was dismayed, face bloated and popping sweat behind the wheel. What the fuck are you talking about? Keep sucking!

She held something up she’d slipped out of her pocket. Gray heard the faintest tearing sound. He pulled his eyes off the road several times, sneaking glances, and saw that she’d just slipped a condom out of its packet. The rubbery lubricant scent wafted over.

“What, uh, what are you—”

“Shh,” she replied. “You’ll like this.”

What, she’s gonna fuck me while I’m driving?

“See, fellas all like it, they just never say so on account they don’t want the girl ta think they’re queer.”

Gray remained speechless in his dismay as she rolled the condom over her right index finger. Then she was leaning over.

“What, uh, what are you—”

“In we go.” She slipped her finger right into his anus, slipped it in deep.

Gray could not reckon such turmoil; he wanted to shout. But then it occurred to him only a second later that this “turmoil” was very interesting. Gray’s entire being felt bloated in the strange, excruciating pleasure, and before he knew it she was fellating him again, with mind-boggling precision. He knew he’d last only a second longer like this, the mouth sucking his cock like she was drinking a milkshake through a straw and the finger roving. It didn’t matter that he’d last only another second, because he knew it would be the best second of pleasure in his life.

Yes, in just another—

Gray seized up in the driver’s seat and came anxiously into the hot wet wonderful spit-filled mouth. It was an explosive release. He thought of a tube of window chalk lying on its side and suddenly being smacked with a sledgehammer, its contents evacuated at once. He expected her lips to pop off at the first mammoth spurt, but they didn’t. They stayed there, more quickly now drawing up and down. Gray’s hips quivered, his asshole clenching around her finger, and then his buttocks rose off the leather seat as he struggled to remember he was driving a car down a winding road. So much semen spurted out of him he wondered how her mouth could hold it all. The orgasm supplanted him into another world; his eyes rolled in his head, and his knees shook to the point that he could barely control the foot pedals.

When she was done, she slipped her mouth off, leaned back, and swallowed.

“Fellas like it more when a gal swallers,” she said. “Don’t know why, but’cha git used ta the way it tastes.”

Gray barely heard her, nerves firing down. He felt like a big sack of dough in the seat. Then he flinched, nearly yelped aloud, when she slipped the condomed finger out of his anus. The after-sensation radiated, and as she’d been removing her finger, he felt some mysterious leftover of sperm ooze slowly out of his urethra.

Holy motherfucking shit, he thought.

She held her hand out the window, slipped the fouled condom off her finger. It flew away into the dark like an expectoration.

“Ya feel better now?” she asked him.

Gray tried to say yes but his tongue clogged his mouth. Sucking breaths, he nodded.

“I knew ya’d like it. My brothers tolt me ’bout it, ’bout how they’ll come better during a blow job with a finger up’n their ass. Some gland up in there, little gland that makes yer jizz er somethin’.”

Gray could fathom absolutely no response. Had she said her brothers? Her brothers had given her a lesson in rectal anatomy? Gray didn’t even want to guess, didn’t want to imagine what kind of family she might have come from. But of course she’d been right, too. Her technical intricacies had provided him the best orgasm of his life. She rubbed his testicles some more and he was still spasming down. A finger up the ass, huh? Until then the only things to ever be up Gray’s ass were turds, but he could hardly argue.

He slowed the car down, unaware until now how he’d been accelerating through the event. Finally he blurted out, “That was great.”

“I wanna do things ya like, cos I like ya. If I do things ya like, then you’ll pick me up agin, next time ya see me hitchin’ home from the crab-pickers.”

“Kuh-count on it.”

“Cain’t have ya thinkin’ I’m a slob,” came her next inexplicable chatter. Now she was rubbing his bare stomach, looking down at his groin. “Cain’t be leavin’ a mess on ya, ya know? I always clean up my messes.”

Gray flinched, nearly yelped again when she abruptly popped his penis back into her mouth and sucked hard, sucking off those oozing remnants. His hips and thighs tingled fiercely as the last lingering semen was drawn out. His cock felt fat, half deflated but still buzzing in luxuriant post-climax. She sucked her mouth off again and simultaneously slid her hand back up the spitty shaft, squeezed tightly with her index finger and thumb collaring his corona. A final pearl of sperm appeared and she licked it right off.

Good God…

Gray eventually managed to get his mind back on driving. Her hand lingered on his balls, a finger teasing between them. Jesus Christ, can she give a blow job…Every aspect of his reproductive capacity—from nerve reaction to sperm supply—felt utterly drained, a bucket tipped over and emptied.

“Youse shore came a lot,” she observed next, smacking her lips, “and you gotta nice cock, a nice-looking knob, and it ain’t all bumpy like a lotta of ’em.”

All Gray could say to the most inane compliment of his life was “Thank you.”

“And you’re nice’n clean too,” she kept chattering. “No foreskin—not that I got anythin’ against ’em but—Chrast—so many fellas don’t wash it out and it’s got all that smelly stuff in it. Yuck.”

“I can’t say that I know what you mean,” he tried to joke, “since I don’t have the benefit of your experience. So I’ll take your word for it.”

The attempt at levity went over her head. Another smack of her lips, then she poised in the seat, animated. “And, ya know, yer come tastes good, not like a lotta fellas, all bitter’n all.”

My come tastes good, Gray repeated the remark in his mind. Oh dear me, is this a night of revelation or what? Maybe if he ever got a girlfriend again, he could tell her that on the first date. By the way, I have it on some very qualified authority that my sperm tastes good.

The girl stared out the windshield and stroked her chin as if pondering a puzzle. “I wonder if what’cha eat effects the taste of your come? Ya think?”

Gray’s smile of incredulity bloomed on his face. “I…don’t know. But I suppose it’s an interesting question.”

“Like, if all a guy eats is bacon, does it make his come taste like bacon? Er-er-er, what if he eats lots’a candy?” Her stare beyond the glass deepened. “I wonder if it makes his come sweet.”

“Perhaps it does.” Gray could barely stifle a chuckle. This is some conversation. “You’re really great,” he finally said when he got his breath back. Now she was daintily rebuckling his slacks, tucking the shirt in, making sure the zipper’s tab was right when she pulled it up.

“There ya go…”

“Look, you know, I mean,” he began to babble, “didn’t you say said you walk this way a lot?”

“Yeah. Ever nat. Ever week-nat that is.”

“Well, see, why don’t we make a deal? I drive home this way every night too, the same time, and I was thinking that maybe I could pick you up like this and drive you home, for, you know—”

She seemed elated. “Youse’ll drive me home ever nat fer a blow job an’ gives me twennie-five ta boot?”

“Yes,” Gray said. “Why not?” The quiet calculation registered: twenty-five dollars a night, five nights a week. A little over six grand a year. Piece of cake. His two ex-wives were remarried now—no more alimony. “I mean, you need the money for your baby, and I, you know, I need—”

Her hand, perhaps unconsciously, squeezed his crotch. “That’d be dandy cos, like, most’a the guys who give me rides ever nat, they’se only pay like five’r ten bucks an’ a lotta times they’se try to do things I never agreet to. They’se all mostly crackers, see, dirty fellas and mostly drunk. But I like you. An’ youse say you give me twennie-five fer a blow? Ever nat?”

“Sure,” Gray said. “Every night.”

She lived way back in the boondocks, all right. An old county utility road took them deep into the woods. The moon had risen higher; it was a half-moon, a yellow lump hovering. Gray kept taking side-glances at it, for whatever reason, but it just made him more aware of the girl. For the whole time he drove, she never took her hand off his crotch. He could feel her hand’s warmth through the material. Then she was rubbing more intently as her big dark-caramel eyes wandered over the scape of the forest. It didn’t take long before Gray was hard again.

The Corvette’s tires crunched over gravel. At the end of the road, a clearing opened, and a little two-story farmhouse sat wedged into sprawls of high weeds. Blistered once-white paint peeled back to reveal old, dull-gray wood, and there were dark shutters with slats falling out. An attic with one blank window peaked out of the structure toward its rear, some shingles missing from the small belfry-like roof. A large garage branched off one side, obviously a makeshift addition, and behind it, an expansive area surrounded by an eight-foot-high plank fence, more old unvarnished gray. Amid the weeds crawling around the house, Gray noticed orange bloated objects sitting lopsided, and then he realized what they were. Pumpkins, he thought. Well that’s damn appropriate, because this dump could pass for a Halloween house of horrors any day. Gray didn’t want to hang around. She had a kid, so she probably had a husband. And the husband must have a shotgun, to fit right in with the rest of this backwoods cliché.

He pulled up at the end of the gravel drive, stopped.

“Look,” she said, “I means, you been real nice’n generous to me, ’specially offerin’ ta pick me up ever nat, but, see, I lives here with my two brothers Jory’n Hull, but, see, they’se’re mechanics, they’se work on cars.”

“What about…I mean, aren’t you married?”

“Aw, no, I’se ain’t married!” she exclaimed as if at an absurdity. “I gotta baby, shore, but that was juss by some fella who raped me once.”

“Oh, wow,” Gray said. “I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t nothin’ ta be sorry ’bout cos she’s a beauter-ful baby.” Her fingers, very daintily, tacked around Gray’s crotch. Things were moving down there again, the tent struggled to rise against the tension. “I’se don’t want ya ta think I’m greedy’re nothing, but, ya know, seein’s that yer hard again, I thoughts ya might wanna come in an’ give me a fuck.”

Just hearing the word—fuck—come from her mouth made Gray feel like he might come right there in his pants. His chest tightened. “But-but you said you had two brothers.”

“Yeah, I’se do, but, see, they’se ain’t here right now, won’t be home till tuh-marruh nat on account they had ta go ta Pennsylvania ta buy car parts at some big car convention. So’s you kin come in, an’ we’s won’t be disturbed. But, ya know, I’d have ta charge, like, maybe…forty?”

All reason was lost now. Gray turned off the motor and the lights, opened his wallet, and gave her a hundred dollars.

“Tarnations! Ya don’t have ta give me that much!”

“Take it,” he said. His words came out parched. “You’re really just so…beautiful…”

Her face leaned forward in the dark. He couldn’t see it as much as feel it—its softness, its warmth. She kissed him very lightly on the lips while her hand lingered at his crotch, his lust rekindled now full-force. Yes, so much lust for her, lust that felt like an inchoate, molten mass.

“Come on,” she whispered. “I’ll’se make ya feel real good. You ain’t even gotta use a rubber if ya don’t want.”

Rubbers were the last thing on his mind just then. In fact, everything was—everything but her. Gray got out, almost fell over in some distractive euphoria. Did she giggle? She led him into the house, holding his hand. The front door creaked open; she switched on a light.

What a dive, Gray thought. This looked like the place Jed and Granny lived in before they moved to Beverly Hills. More dilapidated inside than out, a shit-heap. But then he scolded himself. Certainly she was underprivileged. No education? Picking crabmeat? And she’d do that to support her child rather than go on welfare. In a lot of ways, she was a better person than he.

“Sorry’se ’bout the mess,” she apologized.

The words barely registered. Gray stood in a prickling fog, staring. His eyes seemed to be entities with minds of their own; he couldn’t take them off her. She nonchalantly turned, tossed her head, gave a despondent smile. Then she took off the halter and, just as nonchalantly, stepped out of her cutoffs.

God Almighty, Gray thought.

Even in this tacky place, in this tacky lamplight…she was beautiful. It was a sporadic kind of beauty, an honest kind, utterly divorced from centerfold appeal and women’s-mag chicness. Here was a real woman, however unsophisticated, full of real life. Even her flaws were beautiful: one upper front tooth slightly crooked, one distended nipple minutely larger than the other, an old scar on one knee. Beautiful, Gray thought in his daze. His mouth felt dry. She didn’t seem the least bit inhibited about standing before a perfect stranger totally naked. Fine hair showed traceably from her underarms. A plot of dark-blonde fur puffed from her pubis, and within it, just barely, he could see the lovely folds of her femininity.

The large, high breasts swayed as she stepped forward. “You ready?” she asked.

“Yes,” he nearly croaked.

The vision entranced him, pulled him to his knees. Now he was face to face with the nebulous triangle of hair. Gray brushed the hair with his lips; it was so soft he barely felt it. Just as soft were the backs of her thighs, over which his hands glided until they found their way to her buttocks. His mouth urged closer, the hair tickling, and when his tongue slipped against the nugget of her clitoris, her ass clenched in his hands.

“I—I lack that,” her whisper flittered down from above.

Lack. Like. Yes, he wanted her to like it, that most irrational part of himself. The other part was buried somewhere, interred in a sepulcher of modern common sense. Licking a prostitute’s vagina wasn’t something the upwardly mobile did in this day and age, but Gray did it anyway, reveling in her sharp taste and moist heat. He could hear her breathing faster. She tweezed her clitoris between two fingertips and gently pulled up. The action extruded the little acorn of flesh more directly, so Gray could lick it better. The fingertips of her other hand pushed the back of his head. She was gasping gently now, the knowing human noise turned Gray on more, and her own excitement couldn’t be contested. He could taste it, that salty glaze beginning to flow from the folds beneath the downy hair. Gray couldn’t have been more pleased with himself. He was a techie, a computer geek, yet here he was arousing this worldly woman of obvious sexual experience. If anything, her responses were very flattering.

But his own needs were raging—the needs he was paying for.

“Now, baby—”

Gray looked up, saw her own face looking back down at him between the beautiful breasts. The face was flushed, the eyes narrowed with desire. Her hands were on his shoulders next, urging him to stand, and when he was back on his feet, the front of his pants bulging, she kissed him and ran her tongue between his lips.

“Git’cher cock out, baby,” came the next parched whisper. Gray did, and was tempted to jerk it off right there when she turned around and bent over to clear off some space on the kitchen table behind her. His eyes ran up the back of her legs, over the tight, white rump, up the sleek lines of her back. When he squeezed his penis—just once—it didn’t even feel like his. It was insanely hard, throbbing like some convulsant animal, a fat-veined lizard.

Then she turned back around, almost dizzy now. She sat up on the edge of the table, lay back, and held her legs wide open for him, her feet poised high in the air. “Put it in me, baby. Juss stick it right in…”

Gray stepped up, slacks and shorts down at his ankles. He eased in and out of her, biting his lip. Not again…The simple feel of her inside turned him into a hair trigger about to fall. Struggling, he summoned more baseball images.

“Hard. Do it hard.”

Gray tried but—Forget it. Not even imagining being in the showers with Randy Johnson could hold off the inevitable. Gray’s balls drew all the way up to the root; he gasped. The first spurt of his orgasm vaulted out of him and into her, a floodgate knocked down, but before he could even be aware of the second spurt—

—some blunt object cracked him on the back of the skull. And Gray’s world, as well as all of his desires and all of his dreams and all of his love, turned black.

He awoke, lying askew, on a gritty bare-wood floor. A bright light burned from above, but before it, two blurred shapes began to sharpen. “How’s it goin’ there, City Boy?” someone asked like a voice echoing from the bottom of a well.

Gray’s head barked with pain. He squinted upward and focused. Two men in overalls grinned down, stubbled faces, mouths full of black teeth.

“Cos that’s where youse’re from, ain’t it? The city?”

Gray groaned at the pain in his head. Another pain, somewhere else, nagged at him, but he couldn’t place it.

“Must be from the city, Hull,” another voice, losing its well-bottom echo, speculated. “Them fancified city clothes, an’ that Callaway ’Vette? An’ he’s got credit cards too. Only city fellas have them.”

Gray strained his vision at the younger of the two overalled men. Mussed hair stuck up in spikes; he grinned as he ruffled through Gray’s kidskin wallet.

“This here’s my li’l brother Jory, and me? I’se Hull,” said the other one. This was too proverbial: these guys were hicks, hayseeds, right down to their dusty work boots and denim overalls. The girl set me up, Gray realized, bringing a hand to his head. And, Christ—what did they hit me with? A fucking refrigerator?

“Bet’cher noggin hurts,” said Hull, the older one, thumbing the straps of his overalls. Chest hair and muscles showed beneath the bib. “Jory jacked ya out a might hard.” The man tittered. “Bet’cher backside smarts too, huh?”

Only then did Gray calculate that other pain. He leaned up and saw that his X’andrini black silk shirt had been removed, and his Italian slacks—$150 at Grenadi’s for Men—had been pulled down. His anus seemed to throb in time with the pain in his head.

“What…what did you do?”

“Jory here, see, he already had hisself a nut up yer cornhole. Whiles you was havin’ yer beauty sleep.”

“Tightest boy-pussy I ever had, I still say,” Jory added. He was still riffing through Gray’s wallet. “Hey, Hull! City’s got a couple hunnerts here!”

Gray groggily leaned up. The answer to his question had already been answered by the throbbing rectal pain. But Gray asked anyway. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you saying that you sodomized me?”

The two rednecks belted laughter. “Sodder-mized? Shee-it, you really is from the city!” Jory exclaimed.

Then Hull: “We don’t call it sodder-mee here, City. We’s real folks, and what we’s call it is cornholin’.”

Jesus Christ…

“An’ I ’spect,” Hull went on, “Jory here’s gonna have hisself another nut up yer cornhole, like, real soon. Me, I’se usually just good fer one nut a day s’bout. But a young fella like him? Got a hard dog three, four times a day, he does.”

Gray couldn’t believe this. I’ve been abducted by homosexual rednecks. Hull, he could see, was rubbing the front of his overalls like someone in a grocery testing avocados for ripeness. Jory, on the other hand, still had his penis hanging out the front of his overalls. He flicked off a little raisinette of shit.

When Gray adjusted his position on the floor, he heard a metallic clatter, and then he made the next—decidedly grim—discovery. A steel shackle girded his left ankle, and from the shackle a chain extended. A heavy chain. The chain looked about six- or eight-feet long. Its other end was padlocked to an iron ring bolted to the floor.

I’m fuckin’ chained to the floor!

“Had to chain ya,” Hull explained. “Caint have ya gittin’ out. Sheriff’s station ain’t but five miles yonder, off the route.”

I’m chained, Gray thought again as if to finalize the reality. This fact probably meant that his hosts wouldn’t be letting him out of here any time soon…

“Gits my dog hard juss lookin’ at you, City,” Hull went on. “Come on, now. Hands and knees.”

Gray was incredulous. Hull was dropping his overalls, and so was Jory. “You got to be shitting me, man,” Gray remarked. “You don’t expect me to—”

Hull slapped him hard on the head; Gray reeled. Then he got into position, chain clattering.

“Hands’n knees now, like a pooch.” Hull produced a buck knife for a little extra incentive. It glinted.

“Yeah,” the other one chuckled. “Ever heard’a screwin’ the pooch? You’re the pooch.”

“Look,” Gray pleaded in a last effort, “do you guys really have to do this? I mean, you got the girl. I’m sure she’d be a hell of a lot better than me.”

Gray shrieked when Hull slapped his head again. “What-choo talkin’ ’bout!” Hull took exception. “Kari Ann? She’s our sister! That’d be insesteriss! What kinda pree-verts ya think we is?”

Gray’s brain felt like a single, throbbing blob of pain. Pardon me for making the inference, he thought, as pissed off as he was terrified, but it’s not like I’m seeing a whole lot of morality here. You just RAPED ME in the ass.

“Shee-it. I oughts ta cut me off one’a yer balls juss fer sayin’ such a dirty thing.”

“Sorry,” Gray sputtered.

But Jory railed, “Dag damn, Hull! I’se gonna have myself a good come up his this fella’s backside. Second nut’a the day’s always the best, I say.” Jory knelt and turned Gray around, jerking up at his hips. “Feel’s good!”

“Best not ta fight it, City,” Hull obliged. “We’s gonna have ya one ways’r another. Don’t make me git ta cuttin’ on ya.”

Gray’s eyes widened in more truth. What could he do? Moreover, what would they do when they were finished? It wasn’t like he was going anywhere, not chained to the fucking floor. The rationale of survival set its teeth: I’ve got no choice…

Hull flexed his hairy pecs. “Youse gonna give me a peter-suck while’s Jory here checks yer oil.”

Gray, fully on hands and knees now, nodded grimly. He winced at the sound of Jory clearing his throat and expectorating into the cleft of his buttocks. “Gots ta slick ya up some, huh, City? Give that tight l’'l boy-poon a good lubin’.”

“Jory, see, he don’t much care fer a peter-suck, says it tickles,” Hull enlightened. “Pur-fers a cornholin’ any day. But me? I’se just the opper-sit. Don’t care to have a fella’s shit on my stick much, ya know? But a good peter-suck—that’s what I’se pur-fer.”

“Time to park the car in the garage,” Jory quipped, kneeling right up now behind Gray. Gray’s cheek’s billowed at the sensation: a wet nudge…forward pressure, then…slunk

Jory’s “car” pulled deftly into Gray’s “garage.” Gray blew out more air. The pain was not nearly as paramount as the sheer pressure. Jory’s callused hands held Gray’s hips as he began to draw in and out. Christ, this motherfucker’s huge! Gray had no choice but to observe. It feels like I’m taking a shit in reverse…

“Luckys fer you that Hull don’t fancy a lot’a cornholin’, cos his dog’s even bigger’n mine.”

Hull chuckled. “Now come on, Jory. Ain’t ya got no manners? When yer cornholin’ a fella it’s only proper’n courteous ta at least give him a reach-around!”

Jory pumped now in a steady rhythm, each stoke seeming to reach up into Gray’s guts. “Aw, City, I’se truly do apoler-gize. That ain’t very hospital of me at all, now, is it?” Jory reached under Gray’s right hip and grabbed his penis and scrotum. He squeezed it probingly several times, as though it were an udder on a cow. “Shee-it, Hull, I say this boy ain’t got much at all!”

Gray’s genitals felt like a bag of dead flesh.

Hull grinned through rotten teeth. “He gittin’ hard?”

“Shee-it, Hull! Hard? This here city fella here? Peter on him feels about as hard as a chicken liver! And I say, his nuts don’t feel hardly no bigger’n a coupla olives!”

“Bet he don’t come much neithers.” Hull knelt before Gray’s face, inched up closer on his knees, and fully pulled down his overalls. “Well, here’s something for ya, City.” He used his full hand to extract his genitals. “Like a big hot lollipop.”

Gray’s eyes opened to the size of Kennedy dollars. You’ve got to be shitting me! If Gray, on a good day, sported six and a quarter inches, well…you could add about three more inches to that and it still wouldn’t be as big as Hull’s, and who cares if it was a good day? What hung immediately before Gray’s face was something that looked like an erect summer sausage—with a snout on the end. Folds of abundant foreskin looked like bunched lunchmeat. “You suck on this good, City,” Hull said, then flashed the point of the buck knife toward his face. “Ands if you even think ’bout bitin’ it, so helps me, I’ll’se dig yer eyeball out’n make ya eat it. Hear me?”

Gray, puff-eyed, nodded.

Hull pulled back the foreskin—a veritable sheet of loose skin—to reveal a damp pink glans with a ring of smegma girding the rim. “Git yer yap open, City, like at the doctor’s office, open wide’n say ahhh. And don’t mind the dick cheese. Hail, a l’'l cheese won’t hurt ya. Give ya something ta taste, huh?”

Gray, mortified now, squeezed his eyes shut and opened his mouth, and what was then inserted into said mouth reminded him of a raw turkey neck. Only bigger. “Reach up’n give my balls a squeeze too,” Hull eloquently requested. Gray had to lean all his forward weight on one palm when he did so. And what his hand enclosed felt like two kiwi fruits.

Only bigger.

“Come on, City! Shee-it! You kins suck a dog better’n that. Suck it like yer daddy taught ya.”

This may come as a surprise to you, sir, but my father DIDN’T teach me how to suck dick…Gray reasoned that his survival just now might very well depend on the dexterity by which he performed fellatio on this unwashed hayseed. And unwashed was an understatement. With his mouth so full, he had no recourse but to breathe through his nose, and with each inhalation came the most nefarious fetors. Jesus, he thought. I’ve never sucked dick before. How am I supposed to know how to do it? But he thought about that, and came to a conclusion. Suck it the way the girl sucked you…

He tried to abstract, and formulate his own method of expertise. A few agonizing slaps to the head indicated that his initial efforts weren’t satisfactory, but then…Then he abstracted further: He pretended he was fellating himself. He kept the inside of his mouth wet, his lips tight, and his tongue firm against the basal shaft.

He thought he must be getting the hang of it but then Hull sputtered, “Fuckin’ useless piece’a shit. Might as well just kill ya now. Any guy gives head bad as you don’t deserve ta live.”

The comment was not encouraging, but at least it served as an incentive. Just…suck his dick better, for God’s sake! Gray thought. He stepped up the tempo, his mouth vised open as if by a shoe tree. He tried to suck harder, feeling a slimy leakage begin to form on his tongue.

“Hmm. Not bad, I say. Gittin’ better. Keep goin’ jess like that an’ I might not cut’cher throat tonight. Naw, might even keep ya alive fer one more.”

The rewards of perseverance. But Gray knew he couldn’t let him get bored. Then an idea blinked on.

Like the girl, he thought.

He remembered. How could he forget?

Lubricant, came the frantic thought. The cock plungering in and out of his ass gave him the answer quite quickly. Jory had used saliva. So will I, Gray realized. He momentarily uncorked his mouth from Hull’s hot penis, then he laved his own index finger with his spit, then—

“City’s got some brains after all,” Hull chuckled when Gray reached his hand around and slipped his finger into the man’s anus. It plowed through chunky feces. Gray re-jammed the cock into his mouth, wriggling his finger.

“Yeah, City! That’s it! Now ya got it!”

“Bet Kari Ann taught him that,” Jory deduced, picking up his own tempo. Gray grimly felt Jory’s testicles slapping his own with each thrust forward. “Bet she done the same thing’n sucked his little peter in the car.”

“Bet so.”

“Little jizz-head’s always been dumber’n cow flop but at least we taught her how ta do somethin’ right.”

Mouth crammed with dick, Gray rolled his eyes. Didn’t these guys just crack me in the head for implying that they might be incestuous? Go figure. All that mattered at this instant was that he wasn’t getting cracked in the head again, for performing mediocre fellatio. His index finger tilled through more hillbilly shit, teasing the prostate, while his mouth was fastidiously fucked. Gray’s ass was being fucked with equal fastidiousness.

More smegma dissolved on his tongue—an acrid yet pale flavor—and he willed himself to think about smells other than those which wafted from Hull’s groin. Roses. Cranberry Lambic. Vanilla extract and his mother’s hot apple pie. Reflex, however, caused his rectum to flinch, via such an intrusive invasion, but then Jory approved, “Hull? I say this here fella’s one hail of a butt-fuck. Squeezes up his butthole real tight on my bone! Why, I’se still say this boy’s the blammed best cornholing I’se ever had!”

“And ya’s know what, Jor?” Hull replied, stroking steadily into Gray’s mouth, “he kin suck a peter like there’s no tuh-marruh!”

“Shee-it, I’se-I’se-I’se think I’se gonna come alls-ready. Pinch that butthole, boy! Squeeze it!”

Gray squeezed it, flexing intricate muscles he scarcely knew he had. Then—

Jory’s fingers dug into his hips, his strokes faltering. “Aw, yeah, I say yeah! I’se comin’ in this fella like a firehose!”

Gray wasn’t sure he agreed with the simile. More like a turkey baster full of hot egg-drop soup being aspirated deep into his bowel. Gray could feel it, he could feel the wet, glue-like heat spurt and then settle. And, next, Hull’s own strokes accelerated. “Shee-it, git it, City, git it! I’se gonna—”

The entirety of Gray’s face seemed to swell shut when Hull ejaculated into his mouth. It was a voluminous ejaculation. Long hot spurts, like pieces of spaghetti, launched to the back of his throat.

“Fuckin’-A.”

There was nearly an audible pop when Hull withdrew the deflating—and elephantine—member, then his hand snatched up Gray’s chin. Swaller it now, City. Be a good l’'l cock-suck ands swaller it all. Swaller alls that good come right down inta yer breadbasket ’nless ya want yer eye digged out.”

Gray didn’t want his eye “digged” out, so he “swallered.” And what it was exactly that he swallered was something that reminded him of a mouthful of hot, thin snot. He winced, nearly gagged, then gulped.

And down it went.

It left a warm, strangely minty aftertrail down his esophagus.

“Hail of a come, Jory. Fella sucks a peter better’n a fifty-year-old whore.”

“Take a cock up the tail just as good, I say,” Jory elucidated. “Ain’t never, I say never, had me a cornhole so’s good. Came enough ta fill a milk bucket, I did!”

Gray pulled his finger out of Hull’s ass and was then allowed to collapse to his belly. Chain links clinked. He could smell the fresh excrement on his finger.

“Kinda neat, ain’t it?” Hull speculated. “I means he gotta belly fulla my come, an’ a butt fulla yers.”

“Yeahs,” Jory agreed. “Too bad it ain’t winter. All that come’d keep him warm.”

Gray’s cheek lay against the floor. Thank God it’s over. But…

Exhausted, he turned over on his back, his Italian slacks bunched at his knees. What he saw, absurdly, appalled him. Jory was using his X’andrini black silk shirt as a rag to wipe off his genitals with.

“Man, that shirt cost two hundred bucks.”

“Worth it,” Jory grinned. “Youse the best cornhole I’se ever had, an’ this city-faggot shirt’s the best dick-wipe. Soft.”

Upside-down, Gray watched Hull stick his fat, deflated penis back into his overalls. Then he stood up. “’T’was a dandy nut, City. You done good. An’ cos you done such a fine job’a takin’ care’a us, we’ll’se send Kari Ann up with some viddles fer ya.”

“An’ we’ll’se visit ya agin tuh-marruh,” Jory promised.

“Hopes ya like yer dinner, City.” Hull chuckled, turned, then slapped his brother on the shoulder. “Come on, Jor. Let’s git downstairs now’n git ta work on them cars.”

Their booted feet clunked down the stairs. A door lock clicked.

Then Gray passed out.

“Wake up. Hey.”

Something in a dream patted him on the cheek, jostled him. But when Gray opened his eyes, he saw it was no dream at all. It was still the same nightmare.

Haltered breasts swayed. The girl’s face hovered over his. “Wakes up there. I’se got some food’n water fer ya.”

Gray leaned up. At least the pain in his head didn’t feel as pronounced, and as for the pain in his anus—it felt more numb than anything. When he rubbed his face, he winced; he could smell his finger. When he sat up, the chain dragged a little. He could imagine how ludicrous he looked—in spite of the horror his predicament presented: he was naked, save for his T-shirt and black dress socks.

“Here ya go. Sorry I ain’t’s got no spoon. Yer’s gonna have ta eat it with yer fingers.”

Gray’s vision focused on the object in her hand.

A bucket.

Actually, two buckets, one in the other hand. Just garden-variety buckets. Gray’s chain dragged when he sat up. For some reason, he tried to pull his T-shirt down over his exposed groin, as if he should be modest. Or could it be the fact that terror and violation had shrunk his genitals to what must look like a five-year-old’s? But the attempt was futile. He’d put on some weight lately; the T-shirt could only be pulled down to the top of his pubic hair.

“What’s in the buckets?”

“This bucket here?” She held one up, then set it down in the corner. “It’s fer—Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Gray replied testily.

“It’s fer ya to pee in, and…”

A shit-bucket, great. Well what do you know? There’s a men’s room here. I wonder if there’s an attendant to go along with it, to pump the soap for me when I wash my hands.

His sarcasm served no purpose. The wood floor felt warm on his bare, ghoul-white buttocks. But what was that smell? No, not the awful smell of dried shit on his finger—there was a pale aroma in the room.

She set the other bucket down. It steamed.

“This here’s yer dinner,” she told him, and something close to delight tickled Gray.

“Thank God, I’m starving.” After being abducted, beaten, and raped? After spending the night nearly naked and chained to a wood floor? You bet. Some sustenance was just what he needed to focus on his predicament, and think of a way to get out of here.

“What is it?” he asked. “It smells sort of familiar, but I can’t quite place it,” and then she slid the bucket to him.

“I cooked it up for ya. Don’t really know how to, so’s I figured I’d steam it.”

Gray looked in the bucket. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” he outraged.

Slabs of pumpkin lay in the steaming bucket.

“Well, I’se sorry it ain’t nothin’ better, but that’s all they’se said I could give ya. Hull says we gots ta save money, an’ these pumpkins grow all over the yard.”

Gray shot her a critical glare. “You don’t eat pumpkin, not as is. It’s just used for flavoring in pies!”

“Hull says the Indians et pumpkin all the tam—”

All the tam, Gray thought, disgusted.

“—durin’ famines’n such when the pilgrims wanted ’em ta starve.” Her eyes lit up, as if with enthusiasm. “But they didn’t starve, see, cos they et pumpkin.”

Gray just looked at her.

“It ain’t that bad,” she encouraged. “Er, at least, probably it ain’t.”

“Wonderful.” He pushed the steaming bucket away, no longer even mindful of his shrunken penis and scrotum. “I can’t possibly eat this.”

“Well-well,” she stammered. “Ya best eat it all, cos Jory says if ya don’t, they’ll come up here’n ruck ya about somethin’ fierce.”

“Great.” That’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? Maximum humiliation. Rape him, make him give blow jobs. Force him to eat pumpkin. And why? For the hell of it, Gray realized. If I don’t eat it, they’ll just kick my ass some more…and that’s not the only thing they’ll do with my ass…

“‘Least it’ll be somethin’ in yer belly,” the girl suggested.

She’s right about that. Gray decided to think with some practicality. The pumpkin would provide some necessary nutrition, some energy, and he’d need that to get out of here. I’m about to eat hot pumpkin, with my hands. Or, hand, that is. The finger of one hand, of course, had been up Hull’s ass, and he didn’t want to be eating with that one. He reached in, pulled up a wedge. At least she’d seeded it. He took a bite, his face squeezing up, eating it like a watermelon.

It did not taste like watermelon.

“Is it good?” the girl asked.

Gray just looked at her. It was not good. It was slimy, no sweetness whatever, just a mushy texture. He tried to tell himself it would taste like eggplant.

But it did not taste like eggplant.

“Bet it tastes like pumpkin pie, huh?”

“No,” he groaned. She’d pronounced “pie” as “pah.” There was a pumpkin flavor, though, and at least he learned something. Hot pumpkin tastes like shit. In a constant wince, he ate the pumpkin’s whitish flesh off the orange skin, choking it down. It was awful.

The girl was on her knees, leaning over as she watched. He could see her bare breasts inside the halter but just now even the most erotic image caused no reaction. As he started in on the second wedge, she kneed around behind him, rubbed his shoulders. “Anythin’ ya want me ta do fer ya?” she offered. “You kin fuck me if ya wants.”

Gray smirked, cheeks stuffed with hot mush. “No, thanks.”

“Wanna blow job?”

“No!” A chunk of pumpkin blew out of his mouth. “I’m not exactly in the mood, you know? Those animal brothers of yours raped me. And it’s your fault.”

“It’s not!” Suddenly she was sobbing. “Just cos they’se bad don’t mean I am!”

“You’re worse,” Gray blurted. “You set me up. You lured me here—for them.”

“I ain’t had no choice!” she nearly shrieked. “If I don’t do whats they say, they’se’ll kill me, and my baby!”

Now she was blubbering hysterically. Swallowing more mush, Gray considered her words. She was just a stupid hill-girl, born into poverty, abused and tormented and subjugated from day one. What could Gray expect?

And don’t be an asshole, he told himself. You need this dumb cracker bitch to get out of here. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said, turning to her. He hugged her, a phony gesture, yes, but how else could he gain her confidence? “I didn’t mean to say that, and I know you’ve had it rough, especially with brothers like that. It must be horrible to have to live with such terror.”

“It is, it is,” she sobbed into his shoulder, hugging him back. “They’se always beatin’ me’n sayin’ how they’ll kill me if I act up. If that happened, it’d be the worse thing in the world, cos who’d take care’a my baby? Jory’n Hull hate my l’'l girl anyways, an’ if I was dead, they’d juss kill her. They’d put her in one’a the drums juss sure as shit.”

“The drums?”

“That’s how they’se git rid’a folks.”

The drums, Gray reflected. Get rid of folks. He didn’t know what the hell the drums were and he didn’t want to know. The crucial information had already been relayed—something he could’ve guessed all along. They’re not just going to let me out of here after they’ve had their fun. They’re going to kill me.

But when?

“Look—what’s your name? Kelly Ann?”

“Kari Ann,” she sniffled.

“Your brothers. They’re going to get rid of me too, aren’t they?”

More sniffling as she nodded, gulped.

“How come they haven’t done that already?”

“Oh, they will, just as soon as they’re finished.”

“Finished with what?”

“Yer car.”

So that was it. Probably stripping the car down, for parts, Gray calculated. “How much time do I have?”

“’Nuther day, probably. It don’t take ’em long. Then they-they’se’ll git rid’a ya. But if yer lucky…”

Gray’s eyes widened at the suggestion of hope. “What, Kari Ann? If I’m lucky, what?”

Her eyes were red from crying. She wiped her nose. “If yer lucky, they won’t git rid’a ya right away. They’ll keep ya around until they git another car.”

Gray thought he got it. Jory and Hull were forcing the girl to bring victims back to the house. Then they’d chain the poor bastard up here and use him for sexual relief for as long as it took them to strip the car down.

“If ya—you know,” she began. “If ya do ’em good, then they probably won’t kill ya right away.”

The realization, however grim, came as no surprise by now. It made sense. Homosexual sociopaths. I’m only worth keeping alive for as long as I’m a good fuck and suck…The more effectively Gray entertained them sexually, the better chance there’d be that they wouldn’t kill him until the next abduction.

It looked like Gray would have to be a good bitch.

“Where am I, anyway?” he asked. “Some back room in the house?”

“The attic,” she said.

Gray looked at the room’s one window, then remembered the single window in the dormer-like room at the back of the house that he’d noticed when they pulled up. That window must be this window…As he recalled, it overlooked an area of the backyard surrounded by plank fencing. I’m upstairs. So how do I get out? Again, his only hope was the girl.

“Jory and Hull—they’ve been abusing you, haven’t they?” he started. “Incestuously, I mean.”

“Oh, no,” she answered. “Just blow jobs’n fuckin’ me in the ass. Hull says that ain’t incest, on account of no come goes in my pussy.”

Oh, so that’s how it works.

“But after they started doin’ the car thing, they took ta fellas more, so they’se don’t do stuff like that ta me anymore. They just beat me a lot.”

“And the father of your daughter,” Gray went on. “Didn’t you say—”

She looked down in shame. “Well, I’se lied ’bout that. Just said I got raped so’s you’d feel sorry for me. He was some fella I been seein’, but when I gots knocked up, Jory’n Hull kilt him.” Then she broke out into more tears and hugged him. “I’m so sorry. It’s juss that I’m so scared all the time, I have ta do what they say. I cain’t let ’em kill my baby!”

“That’s all right,” Gray consoled. “I understand. You had no choice. But maybe in some weird way, this is all a good thing—us being brought together.”

“What-what’cha mean?”

Make this good, Gray warned himself. “I can tell you’re a special kind of girl. You’re the kind of girl I’ve been searching for, for my whole adult life.”

She looked up, teary eyed. “Yuh-yuh-ya really mean that?”

“Of course I do. And I can only imagine what kind of life you have here…with your brothers.”

“It’s pretty bad,” she sniffled. “But I gots ta do what they say so’s they don’t hurt my baby.”

Gray took her hand in a performance worthy of an Oscar. “I understand all that, and it’s okay. Any woman would do the same thing—they’d have no choice. But there’s something I’ve got to tell you, Kari Ann, and I mean this. I think—I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Her gazed groped for him, confusion merging with something that had to be hope. “We should be together,” Gray continued. “I make a lot of money, Kari Ann. I could take you away from all this. But you have to help me.”

“I-I couldn’t—”

“You have to unlock this chain from my ankle, and when you go back downstairs, you have to leave the door unlocked. Then I’ll get you and take you away from this place, you and your daughter. Then you’ll have the kind of life you deserve.”

She started with her waterworks again. “My brothers’d whup me! They probably kill me.”

Gray whispered soft. “But that won’t happen, Kari Ann. Because they’ll never know. You won’t have to worry about your brothers anymore. I’ll take care of you, and your baby. It’ll be wonderful.”

Her lower lip trembled. Tears welled freely in her caramel-brown eyes. “I cain’t! I cain’t! I gotta go!”

Flustered, she grabbed the bucket full of pumpkin skins, then she whisked away, closed the door, and padded barefoot down the steps.

Why me, God? Gray thought. Why me?

Gray slept horribly, wakening in the dark from horrific nightmares only to find himself alive in a worse reality. When the moon was high in the room’s only window, he rushed to the bucket, voiding his bowels just in time. His pumpkin dinner soared through him; if felt like he was shitting hot broth. The abrupt discharge splattered against the bucket’s bottom, and splashed back up to dot his rump. Nothing to wipe with, of course, so he dragged himself back across the wood floor, back into sleep, wet-buttocks’d. Later he rose again, to urinate, and—thanks to the single ceiling light that remained on through the night—had no choice but to watch the hard stream of his pee churn foam into the pale diarrhea. The smell of the room made him recall the outhouse at summer camp when he was a boy.

Birds chirped cheerily at daybreak, sunlight invading Gray’s prison. He heard a racket outside, and voices. The chain, he found, was just long enough to let him get to the window.

Maybe I can see what’s going on…

He had to crane his neck but was able to look outside. Down behind the house. From this vantage point he could see into the plank-fence enclosure. There was a garage back there, and a large tarp propped up by tent poles, cover against rain, he supposed. Gray saw several cars within the fencing, including a black-lacquered ’68 Camaro and his own Callaway Corvette with the windshield and glass taped over. What are those assholes doing to my car! his thoughts screamed. They’d painted it cotton-candy pink. And there was Hull in the background, putting on a coat of lacquer with an air brush. More customization had been previously added; silver cursive letters on the back fender read: KICKIN’ ASS, AIN’T TAKEN NO NAMES. Oh, man, Gray screamed. They’ve turned my beautiful car into a dick-wagon! They didn’t even spell ‘takin’
’ right! It looked like a pimp’s car now.

Hull glanced over to Jory. “Come on, Jor. Git that cracker cut up’n outa here.”

Gray’s eyes moved right. “Shore, Hull. I’se just sharp’nin’ the blade.” There was Jory at a grinding wheel, honing the blade of a frightfully large ax. Then he pulled some more tarp up on the ground.

Beneath the tarp lay a naked corpse.

“Yeah, this here fella weren’t much good fer nothin’.”

“Ain’t kiddin’, Jor. Couldn’t suck a peter fer shit.”

Then came a rubato thwack-thwack-thwack.

Gray’s belly squirmed as the ax rose and fell.

“Not like that city fella we gots upstairs, huh? Ooo-eee!” Hull celebrated. “Like ta suck my dick so hard I felt air goin’ in my asshole.”

Jory grinned, setting down the dripping ax. “Too bads you ain’t inta cornholin’, Hull. Cos that boy? Like fuckin’ a chicken’s how tight’a butthole he got. Shee-it!”

Now Jory leaned over, stacking pieces of limbs neatly in the tarp. A forearm here, a shin there. Hands and feet. And finally the head.

And it was a head Gray recognized…

That redneck I saw the other night, picking up the girl. And that’s his Camaro there, only they painted it black…

Just then, the girl wandered out of the garage, her halter top off. In her arms she cradled a naked mulatto baby sucking noisily at her nipple.

Hull glared, paint gun in hand. “Git that tar baby outa here, girl! Cain’t’cha see we’s tryin’ ta work!”

Gray looked harder at the baby. It squalled, naked, in her arms, less than a year old. It looked mostly Negro but…

Jesus…

Closer examination revealed morose defects: a Down’s head, one little foot smaller than the other, uneven ears, eyes way too close together. Kari Ann stuck a distended nipple into its drooly mouth, and that quieted it down. But Kari Ann seemed contemplative, her eyes cast to the ground. “But, Hull, I gots ta talk to ya. I means, do we really gots ta kill that city fella? Cain’t we just let him go?”

“I’ve a mind ta slap you upside the head! Gals shore don’t come no dumber.”

“We gotta kill him, Kari Ann,” Jory interjected. “We let him go, he’ll tell the cops on us.”

The girl’s lip quivered. “But what if, ya know, what if he promised not ta?”

“Girl, you musta been standin’ in the shit line when they’se was passin’ out brains!” Hull roared. “Now git!”

Jory grabbed the severed head by the hair and bolted after the girl. “Hey! Hey, Kari Ann! Come give yer sweetheart a kiss!”

The girl shrieked. “Git that head away from me!”

“Bet if it were some nigruh’s head, she’d kiss it!” Hull contributed.

Jory chortled, shaking the head. “Come on! Pucker up!” Then he commenced to chasing her around the enclosed yard with it. “Hull!” she screamed. “Make him stop! He’s scarin’ the baby!”

“Hail,” Hull chuckled back. “Ain’t nothin’ could scare that shit-baby retart critter, but it’s shores scarin’ the shit outa you!”

“Bet she’se’ll poop herself, Hull!”

Her shrieks followed her like a banner until Jory chased her out of the yard. She stormed back into the house, the baby shrieking. Hull honked echoic redneck laughter.

Yes sir, Gray thought. Life’s a holiday on Primrose Lane.

“Hey, Hull! Gander this!” Jory, then, expertly drop-kicked the head across the yard, where it—thwack!—bounced off the wood-plank fence and landed on the chopped body parts piled on the tarp.

“Touchdown, Hull!”

“Shee-it, boy,” Hull remarked, shaking his head. “Youse shore are somethin’. Come ons, we’s finished fer now. Gotta let this lacquer dry ’fore I’se kin put on the next coat.”

“But what about this cracker I done just chopped up? Should I’se put his parts in the drum so’s we kin dump it?”

Hull hocked in the dirt. “Naw, it’s kin wait. That cracker fella with the Camaro’s skinny,” he appraised, looking at the chopped body parts. “Wait’ll we kill the city fella, that ways we kin stick him in the same drum. Looks ta me they’ll both fit. Then we’ll dump ’em both the same tam. Tuh-marruh.”

Tuh-marruh, Gray thought. Tomorrow. They were talking about him. He even saw the large metal drum in the yard, easily big enough for two dismembered bodies. Gray’s gut quaked.

They’re going to chop me up and put me in that drum. Tomorrow.

But “tomorrow” lengthened into two more days and nights. Gray supposed the inexplicable reprieve was something he should be grateful for. Hull mentioned that he’d run out of clear lacquer and he wanted ten full coats. This was good.

What wasn’t so good was how Gray was forced to spend his temporarily extended life. He was promptly sodomized by Jory each night, while having to simultaneously admit Hull’s rank penis into his mouth. The brothers were having a hootenanny, and Gray’s mouth and rectum were the party favors. But he took it like a man: on hands and knees, doing the job.

Each night, too, he was forced to eat steamed pumpkin. Gray guessed there was more purpose to it than mere cruelty: it produced bowel movements that were essentially liquefaction, the remnants of which left him slick back there, easier to penetrate. After each violation, he’d sit on the bucket and pour forth more pale diarrhea marbled with Jory’s sperm. A terrifying question nagged at him: what would happen when the bucket was full? Would Kari Ann empty it, or would he be dead before that eventuality?

On the second night Gray noticed threads of blood laying in the septic stew. No surprise there, not after the job Jory had done on him just after dark. He’d been really riled, really ready to get it on, and had plungered Gray’s asshole like a stopped toilet. Hull’s finger-up-the-ass blow job hadn’t been much easier. Hull had been holding back—Gray could tell—staving off his release for as long as possible. Probably thinking about goddamn Randy Johnson, Gray thought. Works pretty well, huh, Hull? Fuck. The nail on Gray’s index finger remained permanently lined with shit. There was no way for him to sufficiently clean his finger—they wouldn’t let him wash (and he wondered if they did themselves), so now the dirty finger haunted him. Any time he’d unconsciously scratch an itch on his nose, that horrible shit-and-spit smell was there. There was no hope.

Or was there?

He’d overheard her, hadn’t he? Kari Ann? Trying to talk her brothers into letting him go.

At least that meant she was thinking about it.

The third night, they came up twice. It was hard to concentrate with Hull saying “Wiggle that finger, bitch” and Jory saying “Make that cornhole tight!” both at the same time. Jory fondling Gray’s testicles didn’t help. In time, Gray gulped down another liberal dispensation of Hull’s sperm, while Jory came in his ass like a squirt gun.

When Jory inched out, he slapped Gray hard on the ass. “That’s a good girl!” he celebrated. He reached forward and pinched Gray’s nipple. “You’re one great fuck. Fuckin’ you’s like fuckin’ a l’'l school girl.”

Hull bopped Gray’s temple with his knuckles. “Say thank ya when my brother comp-ler-ments ya.”

Gray rolled his eyes. “Thank you.”

“You know, Jory,” Hull said. He remained standing, his overalls still down. “I’se feisty tonight.”

“Yeah?”

Gray felt disconcerted when he saw what Hull was doing. He was tugging on his deflated penis. What? Again? Gray thought.

Hull went on, “I don’t usually fancy to it but I think, I say, I think I might like ta have me a piece’a his ass, too. Ain’t had me a good butt-fuckin’ in a while. Now if I kin just get my dog hard again…”

Hull kept playing with himself. Gray prayed, Please, please, DON’T get hard again…

Hull got hard again.

“Tear yourself off a piece, brother,” Jory said.

For the love of God, Gray thought. He knew there was no way his rectal cavity could accommodate an erection the size of Hull’s. Something would have to give, the same way as if you stuck a cucumber in a donut hole. Gray’s anus was the donut hole.

I’ll bust! he thought.

“Yeah, boy!” Jory rooted. “Git it, brother! Stick that dirty girl!”

Hull kneed right up and pushed the baby-apple-sized glans into Gray’s asshole. He shoved. Hull’s dick went into his colon, and Gray threw up digested pumpkin mush. It felt like Hull had his entire forearm up there. All Gray could do was squeeze tears from his eyes and shudder.

“Like that, City?” Hull asked and reached forward to squeeze Gray’s “tit.”

“Bet he does,” Jory speculated. “Bet he’s gittin’ hard hisself.”

“Naw,” Hull confirmed. He grabbed Gray’s genitals, which were limp as a handful of Jell-O.

Hull was rocking, driving into him, back and forth. Gray felt skewered. His mind raced against the pain and monumental pressure. “Aw, yeah, aw, yeah…” Gray was nearly unconscious when Hull had his moment. He came like a Gila monster vomiting, and when he pulled out, Gray thought he was shitting a coffee can. He collapsed and rolled over, exhausted.

“Sleep tight, hon,” Jory chuckled.

“This’ll be yer last nat, boy,” Hull informed.

“My last…night?” Gray mumbled.

“I’ll’se be pickin’ up the rest’a the clear-coat tuh-marruh. Then we’ll be finished with yer car.”

Jory was rebuckling his overalls. “But don’t’cha worry none. We’ll be shore ta fuck ya one more tam ’fore we kill ya.”

The brothers left laughing, slamming the door behind them. Gray lay paralyzed. Now he knew what women felt like after being raped; it was far more than the physical violation. It was something psychical, too. His soul didn’t matter. He was just a body to be utilized for primal pleasure. He was the Kleenex they were using to blow their noses into.

And tomorrow they would throw the Kleenex in the trash.

When they were done “tricking” up his car, they’d simply sell it and would, hence, need a new one. They’d have to get rid of Gray to make room for the next poor sap.

And now he saw the cruelest truth for the first time. Could he really blame Jory and Hull for their crimes? Could he really blame the girl?

In truth, no. He could only blame himself. I got myself into this nightmare. It’s all my fault. Nobody’d put a gun to his head the night he picked Kari Ann up. He’d done it on his own accord, for lust, for sex. Because she was available to use.

God, he thought now. Yes, God. Of all things, his thoughts turned again to his creator. Why shouldn’t God be infuriated with him? This was his punishment, the tables turned. Blood and sperm seeping out of his ass, he thought about his life now in an entirely different way. Gray had willingly turned his back on the way life was supposed to be, hadn’t he? He hadn’t really loved his first two wives; he’d married them for their looks. And his other relationships? Same thing. All the wrong reasons. People were supposed to be together for a reason.

To be a part of each other’s life, to love each other and have kids and raise them to the best of your ability. That’s what life’s all about, not going to strip joints and picking up hookers. Gray saw it now: if there really was a God, Gray’s entire existence was an offense. He’d chosen irresponsibility over commitment. He’d chosen crude pleasure over morality.

There was a price to pay for that, and right now Gray was paying it.

He clasped his hands together, futilely. He hadn’t forgotten about the final strand of possibility. Kari Ann. Maybe she wouldn’t abandon him. Maybe—by the grace of God—she’d find a way to get him out of here.

Please, God, he prayed. I know I’ve been a lousy person and have offended your laws, but please, PLEASE forgive me. I’m a hypocritical chump, I KNOW that, but I promise if you can find some way to forgive me, I’ll make good. I’ll change my life, I swear. Let Kari Ann get me out of here and I SWEAR TO YOU, I’ll marry her and be the father of her child, and I’ll do EVERYTHING IN MY POWER to live a Christian life. I swear…

Gray sat against the wall, fallow in the muddy flavescent light. When he closed his eyes, he saw skiagraphic shapes that all seemed to eventually meld into ax forms. When he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed of being raped by devils. If he died during the dream, what would happen? Would he just stay there with the devils forever? If so, he knew he’d deserve it.

“Hey.” A nudge. “You asleep?”

Did he smell hot pumpkin in the dream?

“Tam fer dinner…”

When Gray opened his eyes, Kari Ann was kneeling next to him with the next bucket of pumpkin.

“Oh, Kari Ann…” Gray fell apart, hugging her. “I can’t take this anymore. You’ve got to help get me out of here. I swear, I’ll make you my wife. Everything I do will be for you, and I’ll be a father for your baby. I’ll never lie to you or cheat on you, I’ll devote my entire life to you.” And it all came pouring out. Gray clung to her, crying. “I promise, I promise—I even promised God. We’ll live life the way it’s supposed to be lived, and we’ll go to church and stuff like that. And as for your baby…” Shit, he remembered. The kid’s fucked up, got birth defects and a warped head…It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to God, so why should it matter to Gray? He took her hand, squeezed it, still sobbing into her lap. “I make great money, Kari Ann. I’ll send your baby to the best special schools, I’ll get her the best possible care. I’ll be the father she never had.”

Kari Ann had tears in her eyes too. She stroked Gray’s cheek, unmindful of the nearly full bucket of diarrhea, unfazed by his body odor. “I know you’d do all those things, I kin see it in ya.”

“Then help me! All you’ve got to do is call the police!”

“Cain’t. Ain’t got no phone.”

Gray began to tremble.

“But here’s what I can do,” she began. She kissed him on the forehead. “I been thinkin’ ’bout it, an’ it’s real risky…but I’m gonna do it…”

Gray didn’t sleep the rest of the night. He was too excited, he was pumped. No, the lack of a phone would prevent Kari Ann from calling the police, but she’d told him what she was going to do. She wouldn’t need to call them; instead she’d go to them directly. Today, when her brothers thought she was hitchhiking to work, she was going to hitchhike to the police station instead. There was a county sheriff’s department only a few miles away.

Just be ready.

The way Gray saw it, God was going to give him a break, and Gray would keep his end of the bargain. It was time to give something back.

There was enough chain to let him just get to the window. The window wasn’t locked—why should it be? He was chained to the floor. He couldn’t climb out, of course, but—

I can sure as shit open it.

The wood had partly gone to rot; the frame had swollen. It took Gray until a few hours after sunup to work it free. Huffing and puffing, he kept pushing upward until it began to give. A few times he feared the window might pop out of the frame and land outside in the yard (that would’ve been the end) but luck—or God—stayed on his side. Gray pried the old window up a few inches, enough to be heard through if he shouted.

He didn’t know what time it was but he guessed it must be early afternoon when he heard the crunch of tires rolling over gravel. Earlier, Jory had dropped the dismembered remains of the redneck into the metal drum. Meanwhile Hull had applied the final coat of lacquer to Gray’s formerly black Corvette.

Every false hope occurred to Gray: the vehicle he heard coming up the weedy drive would just be the mailman, or some shady business associate of Jory and Hull’s. No one on the driveway would be able to see the horrific shenanigans going on in the yard, due to the fence. But Jory and Hull heard the vehicle, too. They both froze at once.

Then Gray’s heart sang. A county sheriff’s car stopped in front of the house.

A deputy sheriff got out. So did Kari Ann, from the driver’s side. Within the fence, Gray saw Jory and Hull peeking through the slats. They looked worried.

“Where?” the sheriff demanded of Kari Ann. “This sounds like a bunch of bull.”

“Up there!” Kari Ann wailed. “That’s where they’se got him chained up! In the attic! They’se been rapin’ him!”

Gray’s dream came true. Jory and Hull were scrambling in the fenced yard. And the cop?

He stood with his hands on his hips, staring right up at the window.

“Damn,” he said. “I think—I think I see someone there.”

“HEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!” Gray’s throat belted out the plea like a cannon shot. He waved frantically, then rammed his elbow into a glass pane, shattering it. The pieces flew out into the air.

“HELP ME FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE! I’VE BEEN IMPRISONED UP HERE!”

“I don’t believe it,” the cop said bewildered to Kari Ann. “Wait here. I’m going up…”

Then the cop drew his revolver and entered the house.

Gray’s adrenalin was practically dripping off his fingers. He stomped up and down, shouting, when he heard the cop’s footsteps racing upward. Gray glanced down in the yard again. There was no sign of the brothers. They’re already heading for the hills! he thought.

When the door burst open, the deputy sheriff stared, gun poised. “God almighty,” he muttered when he saw Gray standing there: chained, filthy, wearing just the soiled T-shirt and black socks. “It’s true…The girl wasn’t bullshitting. Those assholes have got you chained up here.”

Gray wanted to rush to the cop and hug him, but the chain wasn’t long enough. “Thank you thank you thank you! Jory and Hull—they’ve been keeping me up here for almost a week! They’re stealing cars and repainting them! And they’ve been…abusing me…”

“Well don’t you worry, fella—” the cop began.

Gray’s heart nearly stopped when the shadow entered the room from behind. Over the cop’s shoulder, Gray saw—

Hull.

He was grinning through bad teeth, stealthily stepping up from the doorway.

“Look out!” Gray bellowed, spit flying. “Behind you!”

The cop spun. “What the hell are you guys doing? You’ve got this guy chained up here?”

“That’s a fact,” Hull replied.

Shoot him! Shoot him! Gray thought.

“And you didn’t even tell me?” the cop went on. “What a bunch of selfish assholes. Bet you’ve been stickin’ him every night.”

“Yes siree, ever nat.”

“Hoggin’ all the ass for yourselves.”

“Well, shee-it, Bobby. We didn’t know you was inta boy-cherry. But now that we knows, youse kin help yourself any tam.”

“Fuck,” the cop grumbled and began to unbuckle his trousers. “I’m so horny I could fuck a hole in the wall.”

Hull winked at Gray. “Well that there’s yer hole.”

Gray’s soul felt like a stone transom whose keystone had just been knocked out by a hammer. The rest just crumbled down.

“Belly to wall, bitch,” the cop ordered. “I’m in a swivet, I need to come so bad.” No time even for hands and knees, the cop shoved Gray against the wall and prepared to fuck him standing up. He rubbed his bare groin against Gray’s buttocks, reaching around to pinch his nipples. “Yeah, I’m gettin’ hard quick. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good hell-for-leather ass-fuck.”

“Well, he’s a good ’un. Makes his asshole twitch whiles yer cock’s in him. Sucks damn good dick too, Bobby. Damn good…”

During the preludial molestation, Gray’s face was pressed against a window pane, and as his buttocks was thumbed open and spat on, he could see down into the yard.

“Looks like Kari Ann done fell for ya, City,” Hull said behind him. “Bet’cha promised to take her aways from here if she helped ya, huh? Jory’ll be punishin’ the dumb bitch presently. Cain’t have no shit like that. It’s a sad day whens yer own sister’ll betray ya. But how’s that fer some luck, City? Of all the cops she could’a ratted us too, she picks the one we’s in business with.”

Gray didn’t hear any more, as he was penetrated. Bile raced up his throat, and he bit down on the inside of his cheek so hard, his teeth clicked. One eye seemed to rove independently of the other, as if divorced from the outrage. It looked down into the yard and saw that Jory had already beaten Kari Ann to the ground. She looked up, screaming bloody mouthed. Jory was chuckling, throwing her baby up into the air, spinning it around like a ball of pizza dough. Eventually, he hook-shotted it directly into the metal drum, then began to hammer the lid on.

And Gray?

Gray was fucked in grand style. The only difference between being raped by Hull and being raped by this cop was singularly noticeable. The cop’s cock was bigger than Hull’s.

Gray felt stuffed from both ends. “Sheeeee-it!” Hull whooped, his penis burrowed in Gray’s mouth. Jory busied himself at the other end, with deft sodomy. “Gawd-damn, Hull! I’se swears this boy’s even tighter’n he was last nat!”

Gray tried to remove his psyche from the scene: it wasn’t his mouth sucking Hull’s penis, nor was it his rectum at the receiving end of Jory’s. Pretend it’s happening to someone else…

“Aw, yeah! I’se gonna dump me a fuck up this boy’s tail! I’se gonna come so much my spunk’ll be drippin’ out his nose!”

“Here comes supper, City,” Hull forewarned. Gray wasn’t sure, but the brothers seemed to climax simultaneously. He felt the warm gush deep in his bowel at the same moment Hull released a flabbergastingly large allotment of sperm into his mouth. Gray swallowed it, without hesitation this time. It slid down his belly like a long, hot worm. Then Gray’s hands and knees went out, and he collapsed procumbent to the floor.

Thanks a lot, God, he thought. Thanks a hell of a lot…

“Yeah,” Hull guttered. He gave his penis a final squeeze, perhaps for posterity. “I’se said it before’n I’ll’se say its again: this fella here is the best cock-suck I’se ever had.”

“Best cornhole too.” Jory gave a hick giggle, then withdrew his own reproductive architecture from Gray’s hindquarters. “Hope it don’t git worn out, now that Bobby’s in on the action.”

“Yes sir, Kari Ann shore brung us a winner this time. He sucks dick like a reg-ler champ, and he’s got a great car.”

Gray slid to the wall and sat up. “And that’s the scam, isn’t it? You make the girl lure the drivers back here, then you guys take over. You got a remake shop.”

Hull scratched his belly, then hitched his overalls up. “That’s right, City. We’s paint the cars all diff-urnt colors, then drives ’em up to our fence. And that purdy ’Vette’a yers? It’ll fetch us some fine scratch. Three, four grand at least.”

Even in his plight, Gray was appalled. “Three or four grand? That car cost sixty-three thousand dollars! You guys are getting ripped off.”

“Aw, we’s ain’t greedy here,” Hull said. “We likes ta keep things simple’n safe.”

Jory, yet again, was wiping his sullied genitals off with Gray’s silk shirt. “The fence takes most’a the risk, see. We just delivers the cars. He moves ’em ta buyers.”

“So how many have there been?” Gray saw no harm in asking. They were going to kill him anyway, so why wouldn’t they tell him? “How many other guys have you pulled this number on?”

Hull stroked his stubbled chin. “Over the years? Shee-it. Probably over a hunnert.”

“A hunnert’n fifty’s more like it,” Jory augmented.

“And way back here in the hills,” Gray added, “no one suspects a thing. The cars are repainted and resold. And that county sheriff probably keeps the heat out of here, helps cover your route to your fence. The bodies are never found.”

“Right again, City,” Hull asserted.

“An’ Kari Ann done tolt us ’bout yer little scheme. Promisin’ ta marry her, help her raise her kid. Shee-it, what’choo think we is, City. Stupid?”

Who was the stupid one?

Gray was dragged by the hair to the corner. Just as he realized what they were going to do, he snatched in a quick breath. Then—
plup!

—his head was quickly submerged into the bucket full of his waste.

“Down ya go, City. Blub, blub, blub.”

Gray was too exhausted to resist. He had no strength, nothing left in his muscles and nothing left in his heart. Were there bugs in his diarrhea? Little things seemed to be swarming in it, tickling his face, but Gray told himself it was just his imagination. He even came to grips with the circumstance now. They were going to kill him, they were going to drown him in his own diarrhea, but then it would all be over. He felt confident that God wouldn’t send him to hell after all of this.

His lungs expanded; soon they would burst. He doubted that he’d pass out before reflex forced him to inhale his first mouthful. But that didn’t matter, either. I’ll be dead in another minute, and you know what? I’m ready.

He sidled over, drenched, and gulped air like a grouper on a pier when they pulled him out. All those liquefied bowel movements dribbled down his face. When he realized that they’d pulled him out one heartbeat short of drowning, he actually yelled up at them: “Come on! Just kill me and get it over with!”

“Kill ya? Kill ya?” Jory said.

“Naw, that were just yer punishment fer fuckin’ with us,” Hull added, “plottin’ behind our backs’n such.”

“Yer diff-urnt, City. Youse the best we ever had.”

“No lie, the dang best.” Hull gave his crotch a squeeze. “I’ll be dagged-damned if I ain’t gittin’ hard again thinkin’ ’bout that sure-fire cock-suck mouth’a yers.”

“You knows, Hull?” Jory offered. “Youse’re right. I’se gittin’ hard again too. What say we have ourselfs another nut?”

Hull whipped it out. “Shee-it, yeah. Come on, City. Let’s make some more whuppie.”

“Aw, Jesus,” Gray groaned. His face dripped shit. Not again!

Yes. Again. Wearily, Gray crawled forward onto hands and knees, a human coffee table. His mouth engulfed Hull’s fattening manhood, and after only a moment of adroit fellatio, it turned hard as a billy club. Behind him, Gray felt the familiar wet splat as Jory expectorated into his buttocks and inserted a billy club of his own.

Hull gripped Gray’s ears as though they were handles. “This shore is the life, ain’t it, Jor?”

“Dag straight, Hull,” Jor agreed, pumping vigorously. He slapped Gray’s right buttock. “Come on, City. Squeeze that butthole like you do.”

Gray constricted his sphincter—

“Yeah! That’s it! Gawd-dag that feels good!”

Gray could only listen with his mouth jam-packed with Hull’s cock.

Hull chuckled, patting Gray’s head. “Shee-it, City. All them other fellas, we kill ’em lickety-split. But we ain’t gonna do that ta you.”

“We’s done decided!”

“We’s gonna let you live.”

Gray’s eyes widened.

Jory stroked away, plunging in and out. “That’s right, City. Me’n Hull’s already talked it over. We’d be out of our ever-livin’ minds ta kill you.”

“Cos yer so good is why.”

“It’d be a waste’a good boy-poon.”

“An’ good mouth-lovin’.”

“So’s instead’a killin’ ya like we done them other fellas, we’s gonna keep ya here.”

“But don’t’s ya worry none. Kari Ann’ll bring ya up viddles’n water ever day.”

Hull chortled. “An’ me’n Jor, we’ll’se bring ya up our peters ever nat.”

Ever nat, Gray thought as he sucked. Every night.

“That’s right, City,” Hull said, caressing the top of Gray’s head. It was almost affectionate. “Youse gonna suck my dick. Ever nat.”

Then Jory: “And youse gonna take mine up yer cornhole.”

“You hear that, City? Ever nat.”

“That’s right, City. Ever nat.”

“Ever nat.”

“Sheeee-it! Ever nat fer the rest’a yer life!”

Gray got the message. He didn’t even bother listening anymore. He just pinched his sphincter again, and sucked.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward Lee is an American novelist specializing in the field of horror, and has authored 40 books, more than half of which have been published by mass-market New York paperback companies such as Leisure/Dorchester, Berkley, and Zebra/Kensington. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee for his story “Mr. Torso,” and his short stories have appeared in over a dozen mass-market anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2000, Pocket’s Hot Bood series, and the award-wining 999. Several of his novels have sold translation rights to Germany, Greece, and Romania. He also publishes quite actively in the small-press/limited edition hardcover market; many of his books in this category have become collector’s items. While a number of Lee’s projects have been optioned for film, only one has been made, Header, which was released on DVD to mixed reviews in June 2009 by Synapse Films.

Lee is particularly known for over-the-top occult concepts and an accelerated treatment of erotic and/or morbid sexual imagery and visceral violence. He was born on May 25, 1957, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bowie, Maryland. In the late ’70s he served in the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division, in Erlangen, West Germany, then, for a short time, was a municipal police officer in Cottage City, Maryland. Lee also attended the University of Maryland as an English major but quit in his last semester to pursue his dream of being a horror novelist. For over 15 years, he worked as the night manager for a security company in Annapolis, Maryland, while writing in his spare time. In 1997, however, he became a full-time writer, first spending several years in Seattle and then moving to St. Pete Beach, Florida, where he currently resides.

Lee cites as his strongest influence horror legend H. P. Lovecraft; in 2007, Lee embarked on what he calls his “Lovecraft kick” and wrote a spate of novels and novellas which tribute Lovecraft and his famous Cthulhu Mythos. Among these projects are “Trolley No. 1852,” “Pages Torn from a Travel Journal,” “Haunter of the Threshold,” “The Innswich Horror,” “Lucifer’s Lottery,” and “The Dunwich Romance.” Lee promises more Lovecraftian work on the horizon.

Among his works: Novels: Nightbait (1982, written under the pseudonym Philip Straker), Nightlust (1982, written under the pseudonym Philip Straker), Ghouls (1988), Coven (1991), Incubi (1991), Succubi (1992), The Chosen (1993), Creekers (1994), Sacrifice (1995, written under the pseudonym Richard Kinion), Header (1995), The Bighead(1997), Masks (1999), Operator B (1999), City Infernal (2001), Mr. Torso (2002), Sex, Drugs and Power Tools (2002), The Baby (2003), Messenger (2004), The Backwood (2005), Flesh Gothic (2005), Slither (2006), House Infernal (2007), Brides of the Impaler (2008), Gomelesque (2009), You Are my Everything (2010), The Innswich Horror (2010), Lucifer Lottery (2010), Witch Water (2011). Collections: The Ushers (1999), Sleep Disorder (2003, with Jack Ketchum), Haunted House (2007), Brain Cheese Buffet (2010), Bullet Through Your Face (2010), Carnal Surgery (2011), Mangled Meat (2011).

Official website: www.edwardleeonline.com

Available (in English)

THE USHERS
by Edward Lee

Story Collection
eBook Edition

Available from May 2016

Available (in English)

THE BEAUTY OF DEATH

Anthology edited by Alessandro Manzetti

Stories by: Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, John Skipp, Edward Lee,

Rena Mason, Gene O’Neill, Maria Alexander, Tim Waggoner, Lisa Morton, and many others.

eBook Edition

Available from June 2016

Available (in English)

POPPY Z. BRITE – SELECTED STORIES
by Poppy Z. Brite

Story Collection
eBook Edition

Available from February 2016

Available (in English)

POPPY Z. BRITE – THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE
by Poppy Z. Brite

Novella
eBook Edition

Available from April 2016

Available (in English)

POPPY Z. BRITE – USED STORIES
by Poppy Z. Brite

Story Collection
eBook Edition

Available from June 2016

Available (in English)

THE HITCHHIKING EFFECT
by Gene O’Neill

Retrospective Collection
eBook Edition

Available from February 2016

Available (in English)

SONGS FOR THE LOST
by Alexander Zelenyj

Story Collection
eBook Edition

Available from April 2016

Publications in Italian Language:

www.independentlegions.com/pubblicazioni.html

Website/English Version:

http://www.independentlegions.com/english-version.html

Independent Legions Publishing
by Alessandro Manzetti

Via Castelbianco, 8 - 00168 Rome (Italy)

www.independentlegions.com
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Table of Contents

- THE FIRST HEADER
- PAY ME
- MAKE A WISH
- MAKAK
- A HEADER TALE
- A HEADER TALE PART II
- THE CITY OF SIXES
- THE DEVILTRY OF ELEMENTAL VALENCE
- CHEF