"Wait a minute," said Mikey, rising for the first time from ground level. "You know I don't care about this fat slob, he was just about to wax me. I need a situation. You know that, Roach; that's why I've been keeping my head down all this time."
"I understand, Scoopy. Scoopy-Poopy."
"Lemme kill him," said Ratso.
"Wait!" Mikey was still trying to re-combobulate himself, his heartbeat still echoing the fusillade. "Roach, you of all people know I had the Cherub on my ass and Wentworth trying to lop off my dick at the same time–"
"Sounds like a crotch-load," said Ratso.
"Prob is," said Roach, gesturing with his gun, "you shoulda come to us first-like."
"You're not gonna lemme kill him, are you?" Ratso was pouting. "Wanna kill him. Just once."
"You got ajob wif me, Scoop. I ain't shut you out the way you ignore me."
Yeah, a job as corpse landfill, thought Mikey. He snapped his trap. He had, once again, been on the verge of making excuses, whining, pleading. Whenever he tried to talk his way free, the shit that happens when people say shit happens. . .happened.
"But you and me, we ain't get on wif any kind of meaningful relationship," Roach said with studious emphasis, "wifout you don't suffer some discipline."
"Discipline!" Ratso sniggered and dropped his gun.
Roach planted one foot on the Cherub's extremely dead remains and nestled the muzzle of his MAC 10 beside Mikey's ear.
Shit's about to happen, advised the mind bees, needlessly, not knowing how ironically correct they were already.
Which is how Mikey came to be duct-taped to the Cherub's decapitated corpse, face down in the sewer at half past two in the morning, earnestly trying to float.
Shit was happening. Wetly. With the consistency of cold brown oatmeal. A thousand gallons upon a thousand gallons more, it kept on happening to Mikey.
He thought of his toilet., For the first time in his life, he pitied it.
He thought of telephones. How many were there in Manhattan? Probably as many as there were toilets. The digestive cycle of the average Homo Sapiens required a bowel movement at about the twelve-hour mark, with a ring-and-rinse cycle after an additional twelve. That was at least two trips per day to the throne for every citizen, not counting what Mikey's second-grade teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had quaintly termed Number One.
And not counting folks with the trots.
Mikey thought of his old constituents, all those ground-pounders who had kept parasites like the Cherub and Wentworth in the business of controlled substances. Drug abuse did horror movie things to your metabolism, and more horrible things to the stuff that departed your metabolism as waste products.
The mind bees cheerfully advised Mikey to throw up. Number Three. Now.
But to vomit, you had to inhale, and Mikey was currently facedown and drowning in the accumulated liquid compost of several million telephone users, a hapless Ahab clinging to a headless whale. The Cherub's saturated carcass was a capsized canoe of hanging fat and soggy clothing. Whenever Mikey tried to heave-ho with a slosh, the Cherub's sheer girth defeated him, sluggishly. Cadavers could be slow and uncooperative that way.
Ratso had married them, wrist and ankle, with duct tape, the most tenacious binding in the drug dealers professional repertoire. Almost indestructible, even when wet.
Almost.
Mikey listed to port far enough to gulp half a lungful of air. The other half was still fermented sewage. He gagged in a spray and inadvertently propelled himself down, down, down . . . not for the third time, but for the hundredth. Stuff stuck in his teeth.
This was not how he intended to end his day; just another turd in the GI tract of New Yor–
Mikey's forehead banged against concrete and he swore. A whole expletive burst from him. And echoed.
The Cherub had beached himself. Mikey could inhale, exhale, all manner of forgotten pursuits. It was a hard-ass, by-damn miracle! He was healed! He was respirating!
Then he puked.
When he relaxed his head, he went nose first into the mush of the Cherub's neck stump. Being on top of this bloated sack of shit still had disadvantages. The bees rallied, urging Mikey to blow lunch again, do it, we understand! We LOVE this guy!
Mikey haulked until he was dry . . . on the inside, at least.
His waterlogged sense of smell had long since pulled the cowardly abandonment bit. No sooner had Mikey drawn a complete breath unencumbered by waste products or the backdraft of his last meal, than he noticed a very familiar sensation. Pain.
Something was busily gnawing on his foot, the one without the shoe. Tiny teeth sought his tender arches through his blood-soaked sock. Seasoned by bilge and water-softened, his toes would be dessert. The Cherub's fat feet had already been chowed.
"Oww! Jesus goddamn!" Mikey was not a religious man, not even a foxhole convert. He never capitalized proper names in holy epithets. This sort of stuff, however, was all he could think of to say as a large sewer rat chomped a jawful out of his calf.
Sharp biting, everywhere now. All the while he and the Cherub had been boating, these nasty rodental motherfuckers had been having a picnic. Saving Mikey for freshness' sake. Mikey was starting to get a tad piqued.
Too dark to see. He thought it was a rat. Hoped. The last bite felt big enough to qualify as a small Rottweiler.
Mikey thrashed as much as he could. The rat was just as single-mindedly committed. Mikey's flesh tore free. He screamed and kicked; felt his foot connect in the dark and a satisfyingly disoriented squeeeek, followed by a splash.
Mikey had kicked the rat away. His right foot was free of the duct tape.
The little sonsabitches had eaten through the tape, which was saturated in thick, rich, A1Sauce-type blood!
Still three-quarters bound, Mikey strained to flop each of the Cherub's dead-ass flipper arms up and over, to smear the wrists, tied to his own, in the casserole of the Cherub's neck stump.
For this to work, he would have to trade the high end for the ratty end, sprawling backward, making an island upon which the rats might gather to feast.
He could give thanks to Edgar Allan Poe later, if he survived.
Mikey tried to turn his own weight to advantage, bearing down hard. The pressure caused the late Cherub to fart, raising greasy bubbles that echoed. His own bacteria was dining on him from the inside, processing him into gas.
The Cherub continued to deflate until Mikey was at low tide, nostrils barely rippling the water's surface. Rats evacuated from his pantlegs and swarmed to the high end. Mikey thought of the Titanic passengers who missed the lifeboats. He listened as the critters hungrily did battle over the potluck in the neck stump. Those that were elbowed out made for the next tastiest target–the wrist bonds. If Mikey could have seen the length of his own arm, he would have been pleased by the cluster of wriggling rat butts there.
A tail lashed into Mikey's nose. This was too goddamn much. He arched up and bit, grinding his teeth. The rat took off as though airlifted. Resolving never to eat anything ever again, Mikey spat out the chunk of severed tail. It tasted like chicken.
He could feel his good hand easing looser.
The next five minutes bore a mutant resemblance to a championship round of Whack-A-Mole, that revelatory arcade diversion in which a contestant attempts to fatally bash as many pop-up rodents as possible. Whack-A-Mole was not as moist a game; this was. In Whack-A-Mole, thought Mikey, your targets did not make such pleasing death sounds when the maul swung down. It was a transcendent moment. Once he had freed himself, a bludgeon had materialized in his fist, and he dealt righteously with his tormentors. He visualized them flung, squashed and broken-boned, gagging on their own ratty blood and drowning. Most of them had either Roach or Ratso's face. It helped Mikey's aim in the dark.
Pithecanthropoidally, Mikey clutched his weapon, and made for higher ground, feeling his way along with feral grunts. He eventually discovered the lip edge of the sewer tunnel and groped up to a concrete ledge
about five inches wide. It was slimy with accretions.
In the dark, he fancied he could see dim, reflected light, or hear distant voices talking nonsense. It was just the mind bees, making up stuff to occupy him.
The weapon in his hand, yet unclassifiable, was about two and a half feet long, tapering, studded with little bumps or rivets up one side. Slightly curved, it felt like wood, waterlogged to porous smoothness.
The sudden voice startled Mikey; his club tried to panic-slip from his hand and his pants tried to fill, but that would have been redundant. The voice was big, hollow and booming thanks to sewer acoustics, sounding like the Lord of all the Underworld, and it said:
"Lookums!
Two hulking shapes were blocking the dim light Mikey thought he had imagined.
"Lookums, Edict." Big reverb. "He wears the Suit of Rats."
"Tapshoes," said a smaller, reedier voice. "Yes. The Suit of Rats. He wields the scepter of the Big Moby Eater."
Rats were, in fact, eagerly re-ascending Mikey's legs, hankering for Round Two of the species competition in which the winner gets dinner. Big time hungry and still death-wish fearless, they swarmed upward until Mikey looked like he was wearing moist fur pantaloons–a downscale satyr with very jumpy vermin. He began whacking the topmost ones back into the drink.
"Uhh–excuse me, guys?" Whack, splat. "You wouldn't happen to know the way out of here, would you?"
"Speaks!" said the big voice.
"He speaks, unto us, our ownselfs," confirmed the reedy one, with a hint of awe.
"HOOO-BAAH!" they both howled at once. The noise blessed Mikey with an instantaneous migraine.
It also divested him of lingering rats. They flung themselves free as though demagnetized, splashing down into the muck and vanishing.
"You are the Comer," said the reedy one. "As was prophesied. You wore the Suit of Rats. You have come to lead us to the Upworld of 490 burgers and all one may drink."
"During happy hour only!" said the big one. "You wield the scepter of the Big Moby Eater!"
"Stop bowing!" Mikey yelled.
Abrupt silence. Bewilderment from the two acolytes, who looked at each other like pinheads trying to puzzle out a revolving door.
"We have offended you."
"No, no, look. . .I just want to climb out of this freak show. Okay? Yes? Good stuff?"
They kept on rising and bowing, rising and bowing, which made Mikey want to kill them. Finally the little guy said, solemnly, "As we must all ascend. You have been sent to lead us. You are the Comer."
"Sorry, pal. I don't even know where I am."
"Lost, as are we all, awaiting your Coming. We are the ones cast adrift, the–"
"Will you shut the fuck up, please?"
"Lookums!" bellowed the big one, drowning Mikey efficiently out. "Feast!"
"As foretold, the Comer brings the feast to quell our long fasting."
"What?" Mikey ached to rewind, to go back to the simplicity of rats trying to eat him. His calf was nudged as the chewed-up, waterlogged corpse of the late Cherub bumped up from behind. Bright boy that he was, Mikey figured it all out in a flash.
"Oh. Feast. Right."
Mikey's lifesaving club turned out to be the bleached jawbone of some large, toothy carnivore. He learned this by firelight, like some primitive hominid in mid-evolution. An odorous trashcan fire illuminated the dank, cavernous switchback to which he had been grandly escorted. This was some long-forgotten dump drain for overflow, made redundant, superseded by progress, abandoned, lost, disused for years.
The denizens of the drainpipe had been living here quite a while. Each subterranean derelict shuffled forth, begging introduction, seeking favor from Mikey . . . the Comer.
The big loud one was Tapshoes. The reedy-voiced keeper of the faith was Edict. Then Fishlip, then Scroat, then Skidmark, and finally Egg, the only female in the congregation. Ragbags all, complete social disaffiliates from the topside world that had begotten so much of Mikey's recent misery. They loitered around, wheezing and excreting, waiting for Mikey to intone some pronunciamento while what was left of the Cherub was roasted on a spit made from a construction foundation rod. Tapshoes had wrangled the Cherub onto the spit, stump-through-anus. The Cherub's fat sizzled.
"Nice setup." It was the best Mikey could muster. "Eh–you're Edict, am I right?"
"I am Edict, the Keeper, at your service."
"Well, Edict . . . could you . . . um, remind me of what's supposed to happen, now that I'm here?"
"Prophecy dictates that we shall feast at the arrival of the Comer. You have brought the feast because we have kept the faith. Next, you are to lie with Egg and deposit your godly fundament. Following the benediction of the Big Moby Eater, you will then lead us to the Upworld of 490 burgers and all one may drink, during–"
"Stop. That's where I came in." Swell. Maybe Mikey would make it into a bed, back on his home planet, Earth, by the turn of the century.
"Feast!" hollered Tapshoes. He hollered this a lot. Before Mikey could editorialize, a steaming swatch of gray meat was unlimbered from the spit and thrust at him.
Mikey hopped the offering from hand to hand. Hot. At least it warmed up his numb fingers, by burning them.
"Let me guess. I have to eat this, right?"
"You before any," said Edict gravely. He was rock-solid in his avowals and had done his religious homework. This was not substantially nuttier than other belief systems Mikey had suffered, so Mikey kept his smartass opinions and questions bottled. At least they weren't Scientologists. "You before all," Edict clarified.
"Somehow I knew you were going to say that." Rather than offend his host, Mikey decided to go ahead and bite his chunk of the Cherub. The mind bees had checked out, wanting zip to do with this deal.
Just do it. His guts rolling and percolating, Mikey tweezed off stringy sliver of meat with his front teeth.
It tasted kind of like a rat tail.
Mikey belched. He couldn't help it. He tried to swallow while the meat tried to execute a sliding U-turn in his gullet He said, "It is good." Then he vomited all over Edict.
Edict beamed as though baptized. One more rowdy hooo-baah was all it took to cue a general feeding frenzy. Mikey was off the hook. They all made ahh noises and tore into their barbecue as Mikey passed out, stone cold on the damp concrete.
Mikey's awakening was rude indeed. He was flat on his back and Egg was riding him like a horsey at the supermarket. His nostrils were clogged with thick, pheromonal musk, the stench of boy cats marking their turf by spraying.
Egg got down, cresting on her own alien rhythm and the firm conviction that she was at last performing the one physical function her dogma demanded of her, But for her hiked skirt she was fully swaddled in rags awash in the smell of every bodily function mammals could manage. A metronomic bobbing at her waistline told Mikey that her tits were swaying beneath the rotten clothing there, almost level with his own stomach even though Egg was bolt upright, impaled, her spine arched.
Mikey had no way of knowing Egg only had one breast anyway.
Mikey made a horror movie noise.
The multitude assembled around them began chanting, their fervent saliva speckling Mikey's face with each lusty cheer. It wasn't much of an inducement to perform; at best, Mikey had mustered that which, in coarse parlance, is referred to as a "Hollywood loaf."
Mikey tried to astral-project. It didn't work.
Then he began thudding his head against the cement with each of Egg's lubricious squats. Maybe he could knock himself unconscious until this was all over.
Bonk. Bonk. Their audience waxed enthusiastic, and timed their chants to each impact of Mikey's occipital. Mikey's upward vantage of Egg began to swim and de-rezz in a dopey wash of colors and shapeless points of light. Her chafed and greedy labia gripped him like the suckers on an octopus tentacle, hand-wringing his uncooperative meat to semi-stiffness.
A rat was trying to crawl up Mikey's butt. The flatulent sound of Egg's vulva
engulfing and pumping him finally scared it away.
Until tonight, Mikey had never experienced the stroke-book ideal of swooning on orgasm. Or maybe it was just the smell.
Right before the casket-sized maw groaned open to masticate him, Mikey noticed the two baseball-sized eyes.
The eyes were viridescent, pupiled in triangular slits. Off-center in each lay a smoldering spot of quartz pink, mineral-cool, reptile-cold. They hated Mikey, with the species equivalent of racism; they liked Mikey, but only as a potential entree.
The mouth was another bad dream altogether. Slime-caked and ridged with crude tusks, chipped and grooved in brown, they meant to clamp Mikey. To trap him, crush him, and rend him into hunks small enough to swallow.
The entire beast was a decayed, dirty color which, on a refrigerator, Mikey would have called off-white. Terminally off. He remembered a Nile crocodile he had once seen in the Bronx Zoo. That critter had been sluggish, logy, and twenty-two feet long from snout to tail–longer than Mikey's apartment. The monster presently intent on eating him was bigger, agitated, and deeply fixed on Mikey, a dinosaur with a big chip on its shoulder, newly emerged from the urban primordial ooze to exact revenge on Mikey, personally, for the crimes of evolution.
Everybody was watching, even Egg.
"Hey! Whoa! What's all this happy crappy?!" It was the most pungent line Mikey could fish up.
"It is the Big Moby Eater." Tapshoes' voice boomed from the gathering of indistinct silhouettes, a Keystone Kops gaggle of watchers in the darkness.
"The time has come for His benediction." That would be Edict, holding forth. "Be joyous. You are the Comer.'
Soon to be the Goer, Mikey thought as the jaws stretched wide, with a haunted house creak, tendons juicing up for the big shred-fest.
It was clear that none of them would be so bold as to actually help him. They would watch. Mikey thrashed for balance in the water as the giant mouth crunched shut on his right arm.
It was the shitty ghost color of the monster that j ump-started Mikey from awe and resignation to anger and instinctive defense. The glowing albino behemoth reminded Mikey of the Cherub, back again to gobble up his life.
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