Evil Companions

by D. M. Perkins

  “For what?” Anne asked.

  “The inspection. You wait here.” While we waited, we looked at ourselves in the mirror angles, and even managed to laugh at the incredible oddity of our white, thin bodies, so clean and strong-smelling.

  “What do you think the alcohol was for?” Anne asked.

  “He said there’d be doctors.”

  “How did we get into this, anyway?”

  “By living. Simply by living.”

  “Well, I wish they’d hurry up with it. This stuff stinks. And I’m cold.”

  The same two silk-suited gentlemen in shades opened the door minutes later. “Ready,” they said, and motioned for us to come out. We followed them down a short hall that seemed to be absolutely spotless, and into a large room with an operating table in its center. Around the table were tiers of seats occupied by as many as twenty or thirty men in white surgical garments. We were taken to the table and told to sit on it, and then our escorts left. The lights were blinding; I closed my eyes and waited. A quick look at Anne showed sheer fright.

  An old, reedy voice spoke: “These are the most undernourished subjects we’ve ever had. What are they sending us these days?”

  Another voice answered: “Never mind. It will be interesting to work with such lean meat. Let’s get on with it. I have an appointment. The two of them are a novelty, don’t you think?”

  “Did you read their histories? It’s fascinating.

  The voice that was speaking seemed to be getting closer. I opened my eyes and saw a distinguished-looking man in his fifties coming toward us. When he got to us, he turned to his audience and like a bullfighter announced what he was going to do:

  “I’m going to have them both work on me at once.” He bade us jump down from the table, and he climbed up and stretched out on it. With one gesture he opened his robe, showing us he was naked underneath.

  “Give me your cock, boy. I’m going to suck your balls off. The girl can get on top of me.”

  It wasn’t a command to be disobeyed. He spoke as if he hadn’t been crossed since the day he was born. I moved up and gave him my cock, which he grabbed with clean, pudgy fingers and pushed into his mouth. I could watch Anne climbing atop his mast as I stood there feeding him. She settled down on it slowly, and gave a little wriggle to position herself. Her eyes were shut tightly. He spat me out and commented: “You taste good. I’m one of the few here who likes boys, so give me all you’ve got. Push it.”

  I pushed it, jamming it down his cherry-red throat, and when I boiled over, he swallowed it all, with much smacking of the lips. Anne was still moving up and down on him, like a kid on a merry-go-round, but it was obviously not doing much good. Finally he just shouted: “All right, all right. Just get off.”

  Then the next one came. I was to let him lick my feet while he fucked Anne in the normal way. Apparently they were all going to take turns with us. I numbed myself to it, doing as I was told, going through the motions as I was pierced bottom and top, as I was licked and handled, until I felt like a piece of warm hamburger. When they were all finished, we were taken back down to the basement again, and left there panting.

  After a while, when we had rested, Anne asked me:

  “What are they going to do to us? They’re crazy—you know that?”

  We were allowed to sleep late the next day, and the Japanese brought us some water to drink.

  “What about some food?” I asked.

  “No, not before an operation.”

  We had to undergo the same procedure as we had the day before, after that—washing, the alcohol. But of course we were weaker.

  We came into the operating theater with our hearts in our mouths this time, with halt feet and weak eyes. Once again we sat on the table and looked up at our audience—our unknown tormentors—through the incredibly bright lights of an operating room. This time, however, there was equipment around the table—and over in a corner, I noticed a cadre of male nurses.

  “Good afternoon. I hope you slept well—and had nothing to eat. We want the girl on the table. You may sit in that chair over there.” I walked over to a straight wooden chair near the tiers of seats they sat in. Immediately, things began happening. The cadre of nurses advanced on Anne. She was given an anesthetic—ether, I think, from a childhood-remembered smell—and strapped to the table. When they had her prepared, a voice announced:

  “Dr. Ozone will perform this operation. Please watch with all your attention as he makes the first incision in this girl. He has been chosen because of his success with sexual transplantation.”

  Zing, that hit. I could barely see Anne for the nurses, and then a fat old man in his sixties was waddling down the steps toward her strapped-down body, smiling as if he were going to accept an award. Everyone fell away from the table. Now I had a clear view of what was going on. I watched as he took a scalpel from one of the nurses and walked around the table, studying the body before him from all angles. Then he raised his arm and brought the razor-sharp steel down on a point just below her breasts, running it from there to the bottom of her belly. One of the nurses stepped forward to sponge the blood away, but Dr. Ozone pushed him away, and turned to his audience. He was given a round of applause. He turned back to his work, and began scribbling on her body, leaving a trail of red wherever he went. As he played, a voice—this time, strong, almost super-masculine—began to speak:

  “Our good colleague is taking us on a short trip through the body. He glides on blood, and we accompany him, as he opens for us the world we have trained so long to explore. And our explorations have just begun. Soon he will stop these preliminaries and begin with what few of us have had the nerve to go into. When he does, let me ask that there not be a sound.”

  As he was speaking, Dr. Ozone turned to the audience and gave a short nod.

  “He is ready—bring the subject in.” All heads turned as more nurses wheeled in a man’s body on a stretcher. I had never seen him before—I wondered how he had fallen into this sticky web. The same way we had? No preliminaries were wasted on him, however. As the nurses cleaned Anne up and sewed up her wounds, which seemed to be superficial after all, Dr. Ozone turned his attention to the young man. No anesthetic was administered. He paused above the boy’s genitals, and then the knife fell. In two flashing cuts, his genitals were severed from his body. His scream began sharply, like breaking glass, and I knew they were all listening as one; and then it fell into a burbling sigh, as he passed out. Ozone held the genitals like a prize high above his head, and received another warm round of applause. He dropped the bloody meat into a pan proffered by one of the nurses and returned to a repaired Anne. There was not a sound in the entire room as he made several quick cuts in Anne’s pelvic area and asked for the pan with the genitals in it. Soon, like an accomplished seamstress, he was sewing them between her legs. When he had finished the first stage of the operation, he raised his hands above his head in a victory sign. More applause. The voice spoke:

  “Dr. Ozone has completed the first stage of the operation: the actual attachment of the male genitals. Of course, there is much more to be done. Dr. Ozone will spend most of today completing his delicate task, a necessity considering the fact that we have decided that this will be the test, not a dummy operation.”

  How many dummy operations had there been? I wondered. How many screams had echoed from here to the moon, because blood country was being explored?

  Anne was wheeled out of the theater; Ozone needed a rest before he went into the more delicate, but less glamorous, aspects of the operation. As soon as she was gone, the table containing the mutilated body of the boy was wheeled into place.

  There was a rustling of chairs, and the surgeons were rushing onto the floor taking little scalpels, even razor blades from their coat pockets, descending on the meat that was left to them.

  I went back to the basement, still in the nude. The heating was no good, and I started sniffling. I got down on the bare floor and rolled over and over, hoping to get sp
linters in me, trying to roll back the sterility of soap and alcohol.

  We had gone some distance, but now they had her in the net and cut her sex, annulling her before my eyes.

  My night was sleepless. I woke up in the early morning and was surprised to find myself clutching my prick, the desperate measure of someone realizing where salvation lies.

  They had to strap me to a table to take me to the operating room. I looked around for Anne, but she wasn’t there. Here we go round the mulberry bush, I thought, as still another voice began. This one was slightly accented, warm, sunny; a Mediterranean voice:

  “This is the other subject. We might have run more tests on him, but we consider this of negligible value at this point. This operation is so new that nothing much at all is known about its effects. It is a brain operation, an operation on a small but important part of the brain: It controls some of the sexual aspects of life.”

  The anesthetic came down over my face like a great black bird. Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush ...

  I didn’t wake up for three days. At first I couldn’t remember what had happened, and then my hand went to my head, covered with white plaster. Knock, knock, new head. I looked around: It was an ordinary hospital room, but there were bars blackening the sun-filled windows. Who was I? And where? What? This...?

  My head, that hard, white cabbage, ventured to speak to me:

  The freak was right. Anne was right. The fraud is night. Get it.

  Something, I answered. I’ve got something.

  What have you got? What have you got that’s not the night?

  Cut the crap. This is it. I’m here. Feel my blood. It might break through my ears.

  You lie to bones? You lie to blood? To kidneys, stomach, heart, and liver?

  But what did they do? Where is Anne? Whose crossword are you crossing?

  So the ice is thin. My prick is long. My nerves play kettle drums. My capillaries jiggle. There’s a dictionary inside here. Turn the pages and they become red. Redder.

  You still talk from the head. Didn’t they teach you anything? Do you still need a knife?

  The knife. I’ll take a knife. A hundred-foot knife to carve a thousand paths.

  Knock. Knock. This is what’s left. What’s left you take and turn on.

  Jump off me. I’m going to put you in a basket and carry you around to scare the innocents.

  Innocents?

  Life is a permanent erection ... from my fingertips. In knees. Kidneys, heart, lungs, and liver, too.

  And after a while all those bees stopped buzzing. Silence up there. All taped up. Gingerly. I reached up and removed that white bulb. It came off very simply, and fit beside me on the bed perfectly. A little large, but it felt good there. My hands went down to my prick and began twisting it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ___________________ Blood Country Explored

  We gotta get out of this place, I said to my legs. Pulled myself up by my middle root and made it to the door before the nurses came. They were laughing. At my headlessness? Or heedlessness of the rules of this new country? Anyway, soon I was in a car speeding south, bugs hitting the windshield and still more raucous laughter this time from the same gray-suited mailmen who made the pick-ups and deliveries.

  We slid into the city at evening. The car stopped and a door was opened.

  “You can walk, brother,” one of them said, and I was pushed out into the street. Walk, so my left knee started the action, and guided by my cock like a divining rod, I made my way. I suppose I looked perfectly normal to most people, as I shambled along, but I was in the fifth dimension, on stilts. But then, how did I know who they were, now that the rules were gone? The darker it got, the better I felt, so I walked around for a while, and when my belly started demanding, went into a restaurant on Second Avenue. Toured the place, the junkies nodding, the speedfreaks doing their tap dances, and finally sat at an empty table and ordered some food. The music was outer space, Buck Rogers sonic waves that made my ears point and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and curl. I wasn’t there long, poking my bloody hamburgers, when I had company.

  “What are you playing with your food for? You look bad, like I’ve never seen bad.” It was Paulette.

  “You came back from the toilets?” I asked irritably.

  “Where’s Anne?”

  “How should I know?” I didn’t want to talk about Anne.

  “Okay, never mind. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got some new friends—meet Gigi.” It was the signal for a tall teenybopper who had been standing in the aisle to sit with us and show me her huge choppers. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, fresh from the suburbs, and so badly freaked-out she didn’t know where she was. But next to Paulette, who looked wasted and aged by ten bad years of missing connections, she looked like a pistachio ice cream cone.

  I felt the little click in my head, and my stomach said ugh ... foul bestial noises that meant let’s prong her.

  “Paulette, I don’t want to talk to her.”

  “Who said you had to talk to her? All you got to do is wind her up and she sucks and fucks like some crazy toy.”

  “Wind her up,” I said, and reached under the table for her thigh. It was thin, and I ran my fingers along the bone, pinching the white meat without obtaining any reaction from her. She wasn’t wearing any panties, and she was dry. I took the ketchup container from the table and squirted some into her. Her expression—eyes half closed, stone-faced—didn’t change. I pushed the stuff up her as far as I could with my fingers, and then took her hand and put it on my fly. Robotized, her fingers went inside and worked it up into a wand. I looked around, and noticed some eyes bearing down on us.

  “There must be a toilet. Let’s take it there.” I had to pull her up, and with Paulette’s help, got her to a small, dirty toilet at the back of the restaurant. Immediately she sat down on the toilet seat and started pissing. Between her legs I could see the churned-up ketchup dripping into the bowl.

  “Hold the door, Paulette,” I told her, pushing her outside. In the dark, I felt another click. The girl had her eyes completely closed. I took out my prick and moved forward, butting her in the eye with it. It must have hurt, because she started babbling:

  “Not you, Dinkie. Please. You’ll mess me up. I have to do-do,” It was a childish, tiny voice, coming in from another galaxy.

  “Plug in! Plug in!” I shouted in her ear. She started crying, and automatically her thumb went into her mouth. Something hit my head. Bats, hundreds of bats were in the room with us. And spiders on the floor. They were trying to crawl up my leg. I had to hurry, before they got me. She was resistant, had turned into rubber. I took out a penknife and hesitated only a minute before putting the tip to her eye socket, and pushing it in, cored her eye like an apple. When it came out, I put it in my mouth to keep it wet and warm, and pushed my sex into the empty socket, plunging it deep into her brain. She whimpered a little, but it came from a long way off, as if I really wasn’t hurting her very much. The socket would admit only about a third of my swollen prick, but the tip was ravaging soft, grainy matter that seemed to feed it. She reached up to squeeze my balls and I began to move like a piston, coming into that sweet pulp with an electric shock. There was a smile on her face, as if I had enabled her to see for the first time, but I had no time to stand and watch the transformation I was sure would take place. She had begun to glow a little, a kind of bright blue in her hair, by the time I opened the door. Paulette looked in at her as I squeezed by.

  “Christ! What did you do to her?”

  I couldn’t answer, because of the eye in my mouth; I hissed at her, and swept on by. The people in the restaurant had turned into bone, and I had to find flesh. There was a spider clinging to my ankle as I went out the door; I picked him off—a scorpion—and flung him at a tourist without breaking step.

  She screamed—a blank face topped with carrot-red hair—and I laughed, lurching out of sight. My prick stood stiff as ever, ex
cited as it had never been, needing still other holes. My trousers were binding it too tightly, so I unzipped and let it hang out in the breeze, moving down Second Avenue following its lead.

  I skipped off down the street, thinking that the Keystone Cops were after me, but of course I was alone. I looked too normal. I ran into an alley and stood there panting, leaning against a garbage can, my prick swollen worse than ever. The only thing that seemed to help was my hand on it, jerking spasmodically....

  As I stood there racing my hand up and down the monster, food wandered into the alley: an old wino with a bright nose and lumpy Adam’s apple. He stumbled toward me, looking like a pack rat who had lost his nest.

  “Get outta my way. You leaning on my bottle, boots.” Then he saw what my hands had been working on, and his blood-speckled eyes widened in fascination.

  “Hey, they go’n ’rest you for playing with youself,” he cackled at me.

  I hit him like an express train, with all my weight, and landed on top of him down in the glass and foodsmears, already driving my erection against his leg.

  “Hey, you might hurt me. I’m an old man.”

  I had to smile, even though he couldn’t see it, and put him out for good. With a few quick gestures, I had his pants down, and his dirty old hole exposed. One push and I was in, and in another minute I had discharged. It was getting easier and easier. The eye was still in my mouth, stored in my cheek like a squirrel stores a nut. It had begun to melt, as if it were candy.

  So this was the interior. Blood bulleted from my heart to my ears and prick—everything throbbed and jumped, and my pole was stone again. I loped a few quick blocks to a subway entrance, and descended into the clatter. None of the busy gray people coming up the steps noticed my hanging prick. I leaped the turnstile and jammed myself onto a crowded train, pronging right into the flat buttocks of a middle-aged lady. She grunted happily, probably thinking she was being titillated by an umbrella; I withdrew and pushed my way through until I found a nubile secretary. Aiming as low as possible, I caused her to jerk as if she had been touched with a branding iron. She tried to twitch her little ass away, but I followed, like a homing pigeon, rubbing her soft meat through the wool skirt. I came on the run, and pushed my way to the next car, happening upon a teenybopper dressed in tight white bell-bottoms. She called for a frontal attack; she was so tiny, my prick got stuck between her little breasts, and while she watched incredulously, I rubbed myself off on her falsies. Her mouth made a perfect red oval of Shirley Temple innocence. I hoped the sticky stuff I left on her pullover would hint at other possibilities.