by Brian Hodge
Once content to observe, the others now started forward.
“It was the one sacrifice she wanted to make, to thank the rest of us for making her feel like she belonged somewhere. It didn’t take long to make up her mind once she decided you were the one. Your leaving just … accelerated the schedule.”
Gabriel kissed him on the lips, then eased his weight back onto Gary’s hips again as the others closed in. Half-men, half-women, walking wonders of endocrines, scalpels, and implants, taking positions at the nipples, joining to him with suckling mouths. They were very gentle, did not bite.
“Lana was carnal … and she was spiritual … and maternal. Like any goddess should be.” Again, Gabriel shushed him, still grinding with muscled hips. “Making children is more than functioning body parts. It’s a thing of the spirit, too. Lana understood that more than anyone I know. And now she’s closer to you than she could ever have gotten with her body. Can’t you feel her inside yet?”
He searched hesitantly, tentatively. Thinking perhaps there was another light, another warmth, pulsing within.
“No matter what, though,” whispered Gabriel, “don’t ever think she didn’t love you. She did. She does.”
Of course she would. How could she ever have done this to someone she hated? What is love? Two souls and one flesh.
Gary writhed, caught in a hurricane of tears and love, revulsion and desire. Fighting would accomplish nothing. And he was so needed.
So he lay back in this roof-bound Eden, beneath the roiling sky, and let them nurse. Soon, more found their way to the roof to take their place in line. And within, and from within, the juices flowed — testosterone and estrogen, progesterone and androgen — a mother’s milk to nurture and nourish wonders greater still.
Gabriel cupped his cheek. “You are truly honored. You’ll be the madonna of an entirely new gender.”
Gary surrendered fully, pleasure and contentment swamping his last efforts at denial. He stretched his arms wide, satisfied that he and Lana would forever be as one, and reached to embrace their children.
In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town
He stood back, grinning with arms crossed, to watch those hips of hers sway while she threw. Had a wind-up that drove him truly and deliciously insane. This, after she’d kissed the tip of each dart for luck. Oh, she was overflowing with promises of finer things to come later in the night.
Sad about her aim, though. Darts all over the damn place.
“I don’t think this is your game.”
She turned chin over shoulder to stick out her tongue at him. “I got games you never even played.” She danced away to retrieve the darts, came dancing back with all six and handed him his three. Green ones, his lucky color.
“The trick,” he said, “is breath control. You breathe out on the throw, nice smooth exhale. And never, ever, take your eyes off the spot you want to hit. Not even long enough to blink.”
Down and dirty blues thumped from the jukebox while he sank all three darts in a tight cluster. He raised both arms to receive worldwide acclaim.
“Am I the master, or am I the master?”
“Careful you don’t stick yourself with one of those, or that shit you’re so full of is gonna run right out in the floor.”
He pretended to bristle. “Sure is a lot of sass coming from someone hasn’t even hit herself a bull’s-eye yet.”
“Keep making a big deal out of it” — she licked her finger and pretended to clean the zipper of her jeans — “and I know something you won’t be hitting again anytime soon.” A huff. “Anyway, I know what the problem is. I’m distracted.”
“By what, that music? Sweety-pie, the way you’re shaking your moneymaker, I dare say you’re making it work for you.”
“No, no, it’s not the music. It’s that goddamn barmaid! Never have I heard a voice that inspires more natural annoyance in me.”
She had a point. That voice did tend to carry. The gameroom was separate from the main bar, but still, they’d been listening to the barmaid going on nonstop about one thing and then another for the past hour. He sighed with the truth of it all.
“Sugar, go take care of it.” Turning kiddish on him, trying to wrap him around that sweet little finger of hers. “For me? Pleeease?”
“Where do you think we are, high school or something? Your problem, you take care of it.”
She pouted until it was clear he wouldn’t give in. Then her face went hard and she made for the pool table. Rolled the dead shitkicker slumped half across it off onto the floor and snatched that monster ten-millimeter she favored, next to his shotgun, and went stomping behind the bar. Through the doorway he watched her point the pistol down, out of sight.
Two shots. Then, after a long pause, another. Joker. Trying to throw off his aim. She danced back all smiles.
“You know, good thing you’re better with that than you are these darts.” He inspected her three, then set them aside. “Here, why don’t you try mine?”
“Look, green may be your lucky color, but it was never mine. I’ve always been more of a fuchsia girl, myself.”
“Forget color, look at the tips of those things.” He pointed at the rejects. “Look how bent they are. You been smacking fat boy in the forehead too long. Can’t keep hitting bone and expect these to stay pristine. Now, no sass — try mine.”
She gave in. Turned back to the guy lashed to the post near the dartboard, long past caring. Her first two throws went high, while the third drilled home with a sureness she found thrilling.
“Hah! Doesn’t get more bull’s-eye than that!”
He inspected more closely. “I do believe you nailed pupil that time.”
“Can we go now? I was getting bored with this anyway.”
He was about to agree when he stepped over another shotgunned redneck for a peek at the hogtied mess behind the bar. “Can’t say as I’m thrilled with what you done to our plans for later.” A sigh. “Your problem, your solution.”
She cleared his Mossberg twelve-gauge from the pool table. “Then start racking. Stick and balls, that’s more my game anyway.”
He chunked in quarters while she danced to the front window, glanced out at the night. Turned the sign from CLOSED back around to OPEN.
The crack of the break shot beckoned to all comers.
Naked Lunchmeat
The trains don’t run on time anymore. It gives us a sense of gambling, we stand on the platform at the 14th Street Station and play the odds whether the train will come before any meatfolk catch wind of us on the stale ozone breeze in the tunnels of the underbelly, and come shambling out to investigate.
The train is late again, and here we are sharing the platform with the usual suspects, and we all look at each other like we don’t really trust our eyes to tell between the living and the dead. Only the old Hasidic stands there with a sense of peace in his rheumy eyes. I figure it’s because his faith forbids a belief in an afterlife and so he doesn’t believe this shit is actually happening. Evidently we must be his idea of hallucinations. In black he already looks like an undertaker.
Today we lose, and people start to scatter with the practiced panic of retreats that leave their dignity intact after the first of them notices the meatboy lurching out of the mouth of the tunnel. When winos and bag ladies still slept down here, meatfolk bred like blue rats. He shows his saggy ashen face and the warmbloods run for the stairs and the streets, forgetting about their spent tokens. No thought to economic sacrifice. The solitary meatboy crawls from track level up onto the emptying platform, and I can hear his slobbering grunts and it still makes me wonder what all the fuss is about. The meatfolk all sound like asthmatics to me.
“Time for toasties,” says Frazzle, and he takes the meatboy by one shoulder while I take the other and before he can snap at us we pitch him down below again. He lands on the third rail and starts to smoke and pop and flop like somebody’s gray steak and a gas buildup blows out the back of the meatboy’s pants and shoots him
off the rail, between regular tracks. Everything’s quiet and we’re looking at each other through the charbroiled haze. The old Hasidic views it all without judgment, turns away.
Frazzle’s got the works in his hand even before he jumps down off the platform. Clears the rails like a kid playing hopscotch, and I think I start to sweat when he kneels by the moaning meatboy who’s sluggishly waving a pair of burnt matchstick arms in the air. Frazzle sinks the heavy bore needle into the meatboy’s skull, better than a doctor. He hits the pituitary every time, like an old junkie finding final life in a bruised and flaccid vein. The syringe fills and he leaves the cripped-up meatboy for the next train, whenever it decides to show, and I can already hear the squeal of brakes and the shear of meat from bone and bone from socket.
“It’s already cooked for us, even,” says Frazzle.
“Fuck the tokens, we bail,” then I turn to the old Hasidic’s back. “Shalom.”
We hide the works like couriers like spies like jesters of greed and take the stairs three at a time and the afternoon sun slams us bright in the face. We almost can’t wait until we get back to the hotel room before tying off and nailing up. After transfer, we slide the smaller needle home, staring at that beautiful plumage of bloody backwash in the syringe, its second of blown-crystal perfection before it thins out, dilutes, drains back into the arm. Always the last aesthetic we appreciate.
Death’s a bitch, and then you live.
The H dealers are out of business now, most of them, because dealers sell a product they don’t make. Dealers are smart but not particularly creative, so they can’t figure out how to make any profit off selling a fix that anyone can go out and find for free, or if not, and they have no moral objection to murder, manufacture for themselves. Meatfolk everywhere, for the taking or the making. Dealers have to shut down in an economy like this, but the way I see it, they just don’t try hard enough to find the really stupid, lazy, rich junkies, if there are such things, the kind can be convinced of anything, my meatboy is better than your meatboy and it’ll cost you, you know what I’m saying?
Some new kind of kick: pituitary extract drawn from recently reanimated corpses, then treated with heat; cooled fluid medium bears attenuated form of virus known among scientific quarters as Quayle-Beta Syndrome, otherwise known informally as Pitchback Fever, the Resurrection Rag, Cancelled Ticket, Highway to Limbo, God’s Little Joke, the Indiscretion of a Lifetime, Rotten Johnny, etc etc etc. Attenuation renders virus incapable of cannibalizing host cells. Intravenous injection results in purgatorial death trance, is metabolized out after six to ten hours.
“The times, they be a-changing,” said the East Village’s Twitching Kalvin Khrist before he shot himself through the eye with a nail gun. Here was a man who truly lived for his work. He was still sitting on a half-kilo of junk at the time. When we find him we have a shooting match and it just like the old days, all the old familiar addictions in all the old familiar veins.
The city’s now filling with meatfolk and we suppose it really is possible to have too much of a good thing because they don’t surrender their pituitaries without a fight, then there’s their own habit to support. More of the slow groaning stinkers every day. In a sense I figure there’s a karmic balance at work here, we two species each feeding off the other, the last cannibal couple each trying to sink the teeth while slow-dancing in the gray hungover morning.
So we hot-wire a Lexus, stock the trunk with fresh meatfolk heads, and start west.
We come out of the northeast looking for the last free town in Amerika, because it’s the way we feel ourselves. For the first time in our memories uneaten by the fluid charcoal reclamation, we’re not tethered to our connections. We score in cornfields as easy as Bleecker Street now. You know what it’s like when God pukes manna, you don’t ask questions, just stoop for the harvest.
Eight hundred miles and then Frazzle gets weird on me, tells me how every Christmas he took down his decorations and threw out the tree, and listened to Christmas records backwards and heard Satanic messages oozing from the speakers. These spells of his, never the same twice. Tomorrow he’ll be singing the last stock reports to Gregorian chants or blinking Morse code haiku in a broken mirror. We get cold in the car as the Lexus’ heater broke down in Indiana so we slice up the back seat and start to burn the pieces in the hubcaps set in the floorboards until the smoke forms a cataract over the windshield. I draw maps in the soot, Byzantine aortas from some other peeled body under the gloom, never mine.
The trunk of heads runs out west of Kansas City and it’s desolate country, fields of nothing waiting to grow. Not even the meatfolk stayed around here. Sun goes down and we shiver. Sun comes up and we cry. Sun goes higher and jonesing we face hard facts, remember a time when they said junkies shared their last fix. A time we never lived through, never wanted to live through until now. A time we never even believed in.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Frazzle say. “But so does everyone else now. And we give it a shot, you and me, Hallucinogenius One and Hallucinogenius Two.”
“I regret I had but twelve veins to give for my sickness.”
“Explorers are never so honest as to explain what they’re really looking for, so history invents it for them.”
“How will we go down, you think?”
“In flames, most likely.” Frazzle dries day-old tears. “Make it quick, if you’re going to.”
So I stab him in throat with gnawed bone. Frazzle tries to hold in his life for a minute then gives up and watches it puddle in his lap, pool of old secrets where avatars lie submerged and suffocating. Ten minutes and he’s back again, so I bust out his teeth with the Lexus’ tire iron, Frazzle looking out at me with a toothless frown and handfuls of desiccated ivory, sad in his way. It’s not fun when they’re strangers, even less if you know them. I’m not as good with the heavy bore needle as Frazzle was, but it’s a learning experience, and for a moment he almost seems to turn his head to give me a better shot at the pituitary, something of the old Frazzle remaining to help me along.
I cook him down and he goes into my arm, in burnt clouds of hellfire and a hundred discussions with whispering maggot voices. For a few hours I think maybe I know what it’s like to be Frazzle and dead, dead for real. All the rest of them, they’re no role models, stumbling around way they do, that’s no death. This is something to hope for? They all stumble for oblivion, are too fucked up to find it.
But Frazzle knows now, he teaching me from the veins out.
It gets me down the road another day, still not afraid to die because now I remember again, but then there’s always tomorrow, and you know me. I forget easy.
I left the highway in western Kansas, the time feeling right when I came upon a green exit sign with a plank boarded over the upcoming town’s name. The old town dead, it had begun life anew. TARTARUS, someone had painted across the new wood, black block letters that wink subtle invitations when the sun hits them at precise angles. I find a town under martial law and underlying chaos.
A newcomer, I am assigned to the employ of Dr. Amway, of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. My job being to report any activity within the perimeter of a postmodern death nature, or soon to be deceased. My judgment will be invaluable, they inform me, for my status as newcomer leaves me unencumbered by prior prejudices or allegiances.
Dr. Amway was a pathologist and medical examiner in one of the western metropoli, has since assumed a new mantle of command combining now-usurped control systems of medicine and law. He is a man of numerous facelifts, with four square inches of original face left, stretched tight over his skull.
“I am the man with his finger up the ass of the nation,” he tells me. “How would you define deviance?”
“I wouldn’t, but I know it when I see it.”
“Splendid,” and he clapping, then lead me to rows of cages filled with meatfolk. They eyeing us with confused dead glimmers and reaching with broken-nailed hands, but not as eager as average m
eatfolk beyond the perimeter. I remark that some progress appears to have been made here.
“I am the great white heterosexual overlord,” says Dr. Amway. “And by that divine mandate I am eminently qualified to convert these poor blue heathen. I must admit, the task might be safer from the go if custom still insisted we sew the mouths shut immediately upon death, but I enjoy a challenge.”
[Note: During Colonial and westward expansionist phases of American history, the lips of the newly dead were stitched closed, a custom brought over by European immigrants. Reportedly this practice still goes on in remote areas of Appalachia. Its function was spiritual in nature, to prevent evil entities from gaining access to the deceased and taking up residence. This measure would obviously be a failure in light of Quayle-Beta Syndrome, but I purport it might still be of use in thwarting their appetites.]
Dr. Amway waves one hand about. “You see the stubborn dead, but I see a roomful of potential. Actually, their chance at becoming productive citizens is greater now than it ever was. They’re so much more pliant now, all they lack is the proper conditioning. Somatic and neural trigger experiences to remember that in their old lives, they were motivated not by hunger, but by sexual desire. They have forgotten that. They’ll eat anybody now, without discrimination. It’s a roomful of raging bisexuals, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m convinced they can be reconditioned to behave as God intended.
“I feed the males a steady diet of Rocky Mountain Oysters, keeps them virile. The females I don’t feed at all. Keeps them slim and, I should hope, inordinately vain. The restorative potential of enforced anorexia cannot be exaggerated. Next week I shall introduce full-length mirrors into the females’ quarters. They’ll thank me then, just you wait and see.”
Dr. Amway has a meatboy brought out and stripped, chained securely to the lab floor by knees and elbows, then he liberally applies K.Y. He dons a stovepipe top hat of stars and bars and fucks the meatboy in the ass. Ropes of saliva stream from dead jaws to puddle on the floor, and I thought the meatboy looked confused before.
