The Earth Died Screaming

by Chuck Rogers

  That night Lalli came to my bedroom.

  She was naked and lit by the glow of the California borealis that just hinted at wonder of her curves. Lalli sat down on the bed and I was already straining for action.

  In the course of her cleaning she had discovered Bobby's toy store.

  She'd found his Fleshlight.

  And his lube.

  Without going into the gory details Lalli wielded it upon me. She deliberately sat so I really couldn't reach her with my hands and I got the vibe not to try. I kept my hands to myself. I thought there might be a contradiction between a sex doll being an abomination and an insult to every woman ever born and a Fleshlight being okay, but I kept that to myself as well. I was falling in love with her right arm. She made a pleased noise as I bellowed in release like an animal. Then she got up, went into the bathroom, cleaned the Fleshlight, did me lovely by cleaning me with a hot hand towel as well, and then . . .?

  She went back to her room.

  Not even a kiss good night.

  I felt kinda cheap.

  I wasn't going to tell her that either.

  Or complain much if it happened again tomorrow night.

  Day two I went hunting again.

  I decided to give the local squirrel population a break. With the wholesale destruction of downtown Malibu, the urban pigeon population found itself having to make a living the hard way. I simply scattered Cheetos in the middle of the dying lawn, sat in the shade and got back into 'Heroes Road.'

  It wasn't bad.

  I had to shoot several scrub jays I had no intention of eating, and throw some rocks at the new squirrels on the block that had come to take over the territory of last night's pasta. By mid-afternoon I'd knocked the heads off four pigeons. Back to the slaughtering board, plucked and processed and presented to the lady of the house.

  Lalli spatchcocked them, seared them, baked them and served them over yellow rice. I don't know where she got saffron from and didn't ask. She set the plate before me and sat down with her own. I poured her a glass of Central Coast Gewürztraminer, and then I nailed it.

  "Lalli?"

  She gave me a slightly suspicious look. "Yes?"

  "I'm a little rusty. Can we speak Spanish at the table?"

  You should have seen the smile that lit up that little face. "Si, señor Frame."

  "Just call me Frame."

  "Solo llamame Frame." She corrected.

  Lalli pretty much stopped talking to me in English at all except to explain certain things above my current pay-grade. So, full immersion.

  She threw the pigeon carcasses and those of the squirrels into the crockpot and by morning we had small game bone broth.

  That night she went back to using her right hand, but she only moved it as I correctly conjugated my Spanish verbs. Remember high school?

  I,

  stroke

  you (informal),

  stroke

  he/she/you (formal),

  stroke

  we,

  stroke

  you all (informal)

  stroke,

  and, them/you all (formal)

  stroke

  Six standard conjugations and I got one up and down per and a happy '¡Bueno!' with a ball squeeze at the end of each correctly conjugated word. Mistakes were met with a disgusted drop of the cock and a borderline painful ball tug accompanied by an imperious "¡Otra vez!"

  "Again!"

  That was a lot of fun.

  I mean screw Rosetta Stone, Babbel or going online. You want to learn a language?

  Hand-job conjugation is the way to go.

  Day three and I decided to throw Lalli a curve ball.

  It was time to go out in the woods and do some real stalking.

  I put on pants for the first time in days and went for a walk. The land behind Bobby's house stops short of being a cliff but it was a sharp slope with a little creek at the bottom. The jumble of big yellow rocks beside it was perfect for my needs. I strapped the .44 Magnum in the shoulder holster in case Winnie the Penis had some kind of gimp-cellar piglet pal lurking down in the holler. I couldn't immediately lay my hands on any PVC pipe so I borrowed Bobby's licensed replica of 'The Staff of Gandalf the Grey' and six feet of Lalli's clothesline. Won't lie to you. I had to lean pretty heavily on the old wizard staff to get down the hill and by the time I did I was sweating and my ass was on fire.

  But as I arrived the mid-morning sun rose high enough to hit the rocks and that was right on time. Gandalf's staff had a sort of root cage at the top that held the magic crystal. (The staff had a hidden button. It actually lit up! 100 lumens!) I fed both ends of the clothesline through the fake wood lattice, pulled most of it through and I had a loop.

  Right on cue about four feet of rattlesnake oozed out of a crevice and sloth-sped itself to the top of the rock pile to bathe in the sun and get its blood warmed up.

  I walked right up and LOTR'ed him.

  Looped his head, cinched it tight and frog marched his snake-ass back up the hill. By the time I got to the top he was warmed up, rattling and thrashing. I put him on the board, lopped off his head, and after he stopped with the Sleepy Hollow routine I cleaned and skinned him.

  I limped into the kitchen grinning in triumph.

  Lalli looked up from grinding something in a mortar and pestle. "And what does the hunter have today? Answer me in Spanish."

  I raised the snake for her to see. "Yo tengo una serpiente."

  She didn't bat an almond shaped eye. "Bring it here."

  There are two ways to eat snake. Bone in or bone out. Snakes can have up to four hundred pairs of ribs. Bone in is usually BBQ and you pull off the long strips of back meat with your teeth and then dig the meat out between the ribs with your fingers.

  It's work.

  The second way is to get that meat falling off the bone. Lalli set the snake to simmering in a stockpot of water and lemon juice. All told it took eight hours but the cocoa powder and the chili pods came out and that was the best pot of rattlesnake chili I ever ate.

  Lalli had brought lard.

  She watched in wonder as I whipped up fry bread to eat with the chili. I loaded a piece with snake chili, held it forth across the table and I literally had her eating out of my hand.

  Paired it with an Argentine Malbec.

  That night I got the boobs and they were nothing short of amazing. I wasn't allowed to touch them. But she lubed them up and wielded them against me.

  That was a lot of fun.

  Day four I took the Beretta Parallelo and went on a walkabout. 7 ½ shot is light for small game but beggars couldn't be choosers. I put a slug in the other barrel in case something larger presented itself and strapped on the .44 again in case something larger and unpleasant presented itself.

  People see California wild fires in the news and think 'My God,' but end of the day the Golden State is built to burn. The redwood trees can't have sex without a nice raging forest fire and the nutrient rich mudslides after. It's how the state renews itself.

  Millions of burning moon chunks and a biblical flood were a bit extreme, but the upshot was it was the first week of spring and the lunar landscapes of the burn were suddenly turning green with shoots and seedlings. That literally meant giant lawns of food for the grass eaters, but that was exposed banqueting, and they returned to the wooded oases for shelter and denning.

  Fish in a barrel.

  I found a lot of deer tracks, and I found the crescent shaped print of a wild boar with lots of little ones all around it. A sow with a sounder of piglets was in residence. I wasn't up to processing a big game animal and packing it out just yet, but I was going to have to borrow Ted's smoker sometime soon and I needed to go steal a freezer for the garage.

  Around noon I heard dogs. A lot of them barking and baying down in the valley. They were chasing something. The good people of Malibu love their dogs. They often buy high status pure breeds and keep them for breeding and showing and they keep them intact. I doubted the
Pugs or Pomeranians had lasted through the winter. However the Vizlas, the Shepherds, the Great Danes and God help us our beloved Golden Retrievers and anything else size M through XL were most likely rapidly fusing into the new wolves of California.

  That could be a problem.

  That could also be protein.

  I'd done a stint in Korea.

  I'd gone out at dawn hoping for some quail or a nice fat pheasant.

  I came back with a good, four-pound black-tailed hare.

  Lalli licked those Olmec lips of hers. "Mmm, hare in adobo."

  Sounded good to me.

  Speaking of food.

  "Lalli?"

  "Si."

  "May I ask you a question?"

  She went full stone-face. "You may."

  "Would you eat dog?"

  Whatever question she'd been expecting? That wasn't it. I got a flurry of condescending Spanish in response. Some of it I didn't get, but the gist of it was that Aztecs had been eating dog for thousands of years and only queasy Mexicans with too much Spanish in them had a problem with it. That, and, 'Try to find a small fat one.'

  Fricassee of Bichon Frise was on the menu.

  She stuffed the whole hare with rice and its diced liver and simmered it in adobo.

  That called for a pinot.

  That was good eating.

  That night I got a blowjob. I made the mistake of putting my hand in Lalli's hair. I got my hand slapped aside and a she-puma glare in the dark. She spoke in English. "Do not do that again."

  I cringed and spoke in Spanish. "I am very sorry."

  "I know you are. Do not do that again."

  "I won't."

  I didn't.

  She went back to it, and she took it to the razor's edge of painfully using too much teeth. I think I was being punished. I accepted my punishment like the groaning, undeserving wretch I was. The top of my head blew off. I tried to blow off the top of hers. When there was nothing left of me she left without a word.

  I felt bad.

  I donned a sarong and went to her room. I hadn't been in the guest room since she had taken it over. I knocked twice. No answer. I pushed the door open a crack. "Lalli?"

  I'd noticed the coffee table was missing but not thought much of it. Lalli had rearranged all sorts of things in the house and I chalked it up to Aztec fung shui . Lalli had turned the coffee table into a shrine. She knelt before it. Candles covered the table, along with the traditional glass of water, flowers, and a bottle and shot glass of tequila. The center of attention was the statue of a skeleton. It wore the black robes of a priest. The skull bore a red mantilla crowned by a wreath of roses.

  It was Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte. Our Lady of the Holy Death.

  Santa Muerte for short.

  I'd seen Latino inmates worshiping her and inked up with her image in Leavenworth.

  Lalli was naked save for a red mantilla that matched the saint's.

  I saw Lalli naked by candlelight for the first time. That almost made me forget I was interrupting.

  She turned and her facial expression reminded me of it in no uncertain terms.

  I stammered myself in deeper and in English. "I am so sorry. I wanted to apologize again, and now I think I've given offense again, and . . ."

  I trailed off before her terrible gaze.

  Lalli just stared at me. Her dark eyes might as well have been the black pits of Santa Muerte's skull. Hell, those eyes were so cold there was every possibility that Santa Muerte herself was looking at me directly through Lalli's eyes.

  Neither of the ladies were pleased with me.

  I flailed and accidentally nailed it. My Spanish vocabulary had been expanding exponentially. Mexican slang is some of the most complicated in the world, but nearly every word in Spanish has a diminutive suffix, usually either ito or ita. If a word was long or the suffix made it awkward to say, Spanish speakers often just chopped off the front or the back of the word and added the diminutive.

  I hung my head. "I am sorry, Tisisa."

  Sacerdotisa was Spanish for a female priest.

  Lalli's eyes remained hard, but the temperature in the room climbed back over freezing as I called her "Little Priestess" in the affectionate diminutive.

  "I forgive you, and so will She. I do not wish to lock my door to you, Frame. However, in future? If you knock and I do not answer, and unless for some reason you think I am choking, do not open the door."

  "I won't."

  "Good night, Frame."

  "Good night."

  Little Priestess became my pet name for her.

  A decent sized hare will easily feed four people, so technically I didn't need to hunt tomorrow.

  Day Five Lalli gave me the honey-do list.

  If I wanted a vegetable garden she would need to plant now. It was Spring, but she told me we could get in quick crop of peas, spinach, radishes, kale, (I kept my thoughts on kale off my face), and lettuce before the summer planting. She could get seeds through the Mexican maid black market but she needed planter boxes. Lalli gave me a list of houses in the neighborhood that had been abandoned by their owners and suggested I steal fence boards. She marked several addresses that had done a lot of their own gardening and suggested I break into their garages and find their potting soil and fertilizer.

  She strongly suggested I steal anything and everything I thought might be useful.

  Ted had hinted there had been a sort of pact that people would keep an eye on the houses of neighbors who had ventured out beyond Malibu. As winter hit a lot of that had gone out the window. Most of the abandoned houses had been picked clean but that had been mostly for food or valuables. It was amazing what people overlooked, and on more than one occasion my job had been to retrieve something for someone.

  I know where people hide things.

  I didn't need to hunt that day but that was no reason not to stay golden in my girl's eyes. It only took a few minutes and two empty one-gallon plastic jugs to make a crawdaddy trap. I baited it with the rabbit guts I'd left rotting inside the BBQ for the purpose, (Crayfish are scavengers. They operate by sense of smell and mostly at night.), and the walk down to the creek was getting easier and easier.

  I called on the Cutshalls and asked Ted if I could borrow his pick-up to go looting. He pulled a face. Then he asked if he could come along. I showed him Lalli's list. He snorted at the first address. "Oh yeah, fuck them. They call the cops on the block party every year and that asshole still has my hedge-trimmer."

  The house had already been looted but the Fuck Them household gave me everything I needed plus in one fell swoop.

  We knocked down a good bit of fence. It was good to have an extra pair of hands. Especially when I stole the Fuck Them's garage freezer. Despite being a party pooper the basement revealed That Asshole brewed his own beer. The bottles had been stolen, but sitting right there were two five gallon pony kegs, full, with DO NOT TAP UNITL XMAS tags. Ted and I gave each other shit-eating grins. Underneath the brewing bench? Right there. Great big sack of malted barley and another of yeast. I can kinda understand looters not knowing what to do with those or the hops. But the two big sacks of rice and corn?

  C'mon.

  This is the apocalypse and you're not even trying.

  "Hey, Ted."

  "Frame?"

  "You're a good neighbor."

  "Thanks!"

  "Want to learn how to toss a house?"

  "Oh, yeah!"

  Every rich person has a safe but even people with safes and safe rooms feel the need to hide things. The police, the IRS and ill-opinionated home invaders can make you open that steel door.

  But what they don't know about they won't miss.

  We tossed the Fuck Them house dirty. We tapped walls, checked floorboards slashed mattresses, checked behind and underneath and claw-hammered the corners and joints in a house that formed convenient, empty spaces.

  It appeared the Fuck Them's had really thought they were coming back. We found a hundred grand in c
ash, but that was most likely toilet paper now. We found a substantial cache of oxycodone. Ted wanted no part of it, but that was money before the end of the world and was likely pure gold now. Speaking of gold, we found a hundred Canadian one-ounce maple leaf coins and Ted was happy as a pirate to split that. None of the clothes fit me, and Lalli and Mrs. Fuck Them were definitely built to different proportions. But I stole the fur coats. Ted took a bunch of stuff for him and his wife. We bagged the rest for trade. Knives were always useful and no one was forging any more of them at the moment and we ended up cleaning out the kitchen of nearly everything. We took a lot of other sundries. We split all the toilet paper, Kleenex and paper towels. (That was mostly for the ladies.) I found a few cartons of cigarettes. I'd quit for good, but cigarettes were currency all over the world. We stole the DVD collection, divvied them by preference, rock-scissors-papered for the disputed and agreed to exchange later.

  Ted got his hedge trimmer back.

  It was a moral victory.

  I came home to find Clarice in the house. She seemed uncomfortable around Lalli and I thought maybe the Guftasons had started running their mouths. Lalli didn't look happy either and immediately left to conduct black market maid business. Clarice took the stitches out of my face. She gave me a sidelong look. "So, you and her . . .?"

  "You throwing your hat in the ring?"

  She turned red. "No . . ."

  "Okay, then."

  "Right." Clarice told me my face was healing well. She checked my ass. It itched more than it hurt. My face was right on time at five days and she took the stitches out. Faces have an excellent blood supply and healing is fast. She told me seven days would be plenty for my posterior and she'd be back for my butt. That, and keep applying the antibiotic. I went and looked in the bathroom mirror. I had lovely sets of Frankenstein railroad tracks splitting up my face. All of Malibu's cosmetic surgery clinics had been wiped out by the tsunami, so if I wanted to get prettied up I would have to hunt down a surgeon in Los Angeles. No one knew exactly what was happening in LA at the moment, but everyone agreed it was very likely bad.

  I never spent much time looking in the mirror. Less now. If I was scary looking? If would probably serve me well in this brave new world. If my ass looked like a mile of bad road? Maybe the bears, literal and metaphorical, would leave it alone.