Acquaro

by Trevor R. Fairbanks

  “I will not.”

  Lordax narrowed his eyes, searching for the lie in Joseph’s word. The drug dealer froze, knowing that the elf could do things to him if he dared to lie. In his mind a figment stirred. An ancient dragon hissed.

  “Aye, I don’t think you will,” Lordax smiled. The smoke appeared again, billowing around him in an inferno. Lordax nodded to Joseph Opus then stepped inside. The smoke vanished.

  Joseph Opus looked down at the vial in his hand. Now where had that come from? He got up off the couch and went to the meth lab that he had built in the guest bedroom. On the shelf were two other vials but neither of them where any good. This was perfect.

  The third vial was filled with a thin blue substance that looked like some form of Mercury one would find on the planet Mars. Joseph took a step back and proudly admired his masterpiece in the light. Then he took a step forward and stared at it through narrow eyes, like an artist inspecting his work. It was beautiful.

  The color and the consistency were perfect, like a crushed neon that would do well on the grimy streets of cities like New York and LA. And beautiful drugs were always more expensive. This drug was not just some cheap high, it was a fashion statement in of itself. A very lovely fashion statement.

  How long had he been working to create this? A long time, ever since he had first assembled the parts of the laboratory in his bedroom. Then he had the dream, a dream of a drug that would get the entire world high. A drug that would ease the suffering of humanity, one addict at a time.

  Now he had it, just the right mix of chemicals and compositions. He left the laboratory and went into the bedroom.

  “Rich,” he told Marget as she sat on the bed, reading a fashion magazine. She was always reading fashion magazines. She liked to look at the beautiful women and dream of what it might be like to be flawless. Only Joseph Opus could make her look up from her magazine.

  “What?”

  “Honey, we are going to be rich.” He took the vial and held it up to the light, looking at the tiny gold flecks dancing in the sun. His eyes drifted over to her. “This is it, dear. This is the drug that will make us a million dollars.”

  Marget sat up and her afternoon shadow loomed behind him. “You’ve said that before.”

  Joseph felt his spirit crush. Five years from now this was the drug everyone would be using couldn’t she see that? It would be synthesized and bootlegged. It would help lift third world economies from poverty and give dictators the power they needed to control their population. The government would declare war. Blood would flow. Men would die all in the name of this beautiful pale blue drug.

  This was the drug of the future and that future belonged to Joseph Opus.

  “We shall see,” he said, taking it to the living room so that he could get a better view. “Won’t we?”

  He opened the door to his trailer and let the fresh air flow in. It was a nice day out. The sun was clear, and the sky was bright. Joseph looked at the world and knew that he had done the impossible. He had bottled pleasure.

  In the alleyway behind his trailer he could hear some children playing. An odd sound. He could not remember there being any children in The Copacabana before. But maybe that was just God’s way of telling him that he was ready. The stars were aligned.

  There were three boys and a girl. Perfect. Joseph looked at them the way a scientist looks at his laboratory rats. And this would give him a chance to learn if the drug had a different effect on different sexes.

  The children were running through the plastic grass he had instead of a lawn, playing some weird form of tag that was more violent than the tag he could remember. Two of the boys wore bad fitting suits that almost looked like those given to prison inmates when they were freed. The other two kids, were those two kids naked? It did not matter. He was too old to understand the fashions of youth.

  “Children!” he called out. The game they were playing, whatever it was, came to a grinding halt. The children looked at him then came over, like feathers returning to the goose. “I have something for you!” he held up the vial.

  “What is that?” one of the boys asked and Joseph could see the curiosity in his mud brown eyes. He was already an addict, Joseph knew. People were always attracted to beautiful things. Men sold their soul for beauty. And this drug was sexy.

  “It’s candy,” Joseph replied. “Would you care for some?”

  “We aren’t supposed to talk to strangers,” the other boy in the suit said. The naked children did not talk, just looked at him with wide eyes as if they were seeing the world for the first time.

  “Oh, but I am not a stranger. I am a candy maker. It is my job to make children like you happy.” He looked down at them. Polite society had conditioned them to be wary of men like him. But there had to be a way.

  Joseph held the vial out like a tantalizing treat. He looked at their sweaty little faces and their done-at-

  home haircuts. They were breathing deep from their exertions. They looked thirsty.

  “Roderick,” the smaller boy said, tugging at the sleeve of the larger. “I don’t think ...”

  “Shut up,” the larger boy told him. “Candy makes us thirsty, mister.”

  “Of course. Marget!” he called out. “Some water, please?”

  The kids looked at each other and shrugged. Nodded. Some water did sound nice, especially on such a hot day. Then one of the boys read the side of his trailer.

  “Hey, who’s Ringworm?”

  “Never you mind,” Joseph snapped as Marget came out with four glasses of fresh tap water on a silver tray. Joseph dripped some of the blue in each one. “All right. Who’s first?”

  “Me,” the girl said, stepping forward. Joseph could not get over the fact that she was naked, and such a pretty thing. It was unnerving, to see a child in such a state. But, that was life in the trailer park. There was a freedom here that people in the big cities would never know or understand.

  “Here you are,” he said, handing her the glass. He watched her drink and felt a rush. This was it. This was the beginning. In a few days she would kill her mother for another taste of this. Joseph watched her drink. She was beautiful in a way that Joseph could not understand. Certainly, she had the eyes of a goddess. Maybe when Marget wasn’t around he might ...

  Both her eyes lit up. “Oh, gosh! Oh, wow!”

  Joseph smiled as the girl stretched her arms out and pretended to fly. He watched her naked body pinwheel down the street, making sputtering noises with her lips.

  The other children lined up and he gave them each a glass in turn. They drank. He watched as the eyes of the two boys in suits exploded. “How do you feel?” the tall one asked the small one.

  “I ...” he looked down at his hands, spreading the fingers wide as if he had never seen them before. “I feel fucking great.”

  “And what about you?” he asked the naked boy.

  “I’m fine,” he stammered. “Just fine. So, is this what humans do for fun?”

  “No,” the large boy replied, shaking his head. “This is what humans do for fun,” and just like that the two boys chased the third, the naked one, running through the park.

  Perfect. This was the drug of the future. Joseph ducked back into his trailer. Tonight, he was going to fuck Marget like she had never been fucked before.

  He was going to fuck her like a rich man. And she was going to be his whore.

  The Vile Three

  “You know what humans are made of ...”

  “Excrement.”

  Roderick and Jamie looked at one another. The two children, named Omnithax and Orjure, were strange. And not just because of their nudity. They spoke with strange words. They had strange mannerisms. They were just plain strange. Jamie and Roderick knew strange.

  “How so?” Jamie asked, remembering this video that Miss Felony had showed them once. It was German, and featured a grown man defecating all over a young woman. Having seen that Omnithax and Orjure’s theory did not seem so farfetched. />
  “Once there was a God ...”

  “Who walked along a beach.”

  “He found a pile of horse dung ...”

  “And this God was lonely.”

  “So, he crafted a man ...”

  “And then a woman.”

  “He breathed life into them ...”

  “The world was changed forever.”

  They laughed, that strange tittering laugh that seemed to tickle Jamie in places he had never felt before, places that went lower than his spine. When he looked in Orjure’s eyes as she laughed he liked this feeling.

  “Bullshit,” Roderick said. He stood up, brushing the dust off his pants. They were behind the trailer park, over next to the wash. A concrete bridge ran over the absent river, dried out with the drought of summer. Of course, the boys had never been here before, but sometimes they heard the Mexicans having their cockfights back here. Even now there were beer cans and stains, scattered feathers that had floated down into the wash. “We’re flesh and blood, not shit.”

  Omnithax and Orjure laughed again. Roderick grit his teeth. That strange blue stuff was flowing in his veins and he had made his decision. Unlike Jamie he did not like their laugh. He did not like the way it made him feel. When he looked at Orjure he felt like a little boy. It was time to be a man.

  Roughly, he grabbed Orjure by the arm and jerked her to her feet. She just laughed louder. Even Omnithax made no more to stop him.

  Jamie did, jumping up. “Roderick!” he cried, “What are you doing?”

  But he knew. He had seen the movies. He knew what men did to women. “I’m going to get fucking laid,” he said, dragging her over to a rock. “And when I’m done you’re going to get laid, too.”

  “Oh!” Omnithax grinned following them over. “She’ll like that!” His tiny penis was already at half-mast.

  “What is it with you two?” Jamie asked him. Behind them Roderick had his way with the girl. Jamie was surprised. Surely Omnithax should be jealous or angry.

  Instead he just watched with a happy smile on his face, as if he was seeing a porno movie or something. He even reached down to touch himself.

  “Oh!” Orjure squealed. “He’s big!”

  “I don’t understand,” Omnithax said to him. “What do you mean?”

  “Where did you come from?” Jamie asked.

  Omnithax shrugged and looked to the sky. Then he sighed. “We took these bodies from Leonard Samson. It was an even trade.”

  “Leonard Samson?” Jamie rolled the name around in his head. He had heard it before but where? Of course! He was that old guy who lived in the trailer down the way. Miss Felony was always talking about how she knew him, once. But she would never say from where. And he never came out of his trailer. “What did you trade?”

  Omnithax grinned. “We gave him our power. The power of the Gods. Now he is gone.”

  “Gone,” Jamie nodded. But where would he go? “You really had the power of Gods and you gave it to him?”

  “In exchange for his body. We wanted to see what it was like. To be human. To be excrement. This is what it is like.” He pointed to Orjure, who was busy being buggered by Roderick. “To breathe and live. To feel! To fuck! This is what we wanted.”

  It made a certain amount of sense, Jamie thought. Against the rock Roderick started to groan. Jamie recognized that sound. He was about to come.

  “Finished,” he said, going back to Omnithax and Jamie. He zipped up his pants and looked at his little brother. “Your turn.”

  “I don’t know,” Jamie said.

  Roderick grabbed him roughly by the arm and dragged him over to her. Orjure was still bent over the rock, her pussy drooling with semen. “Get in there and fuck her, man. Trust me, it feels good. She’s tight.”

  Jamie knew that there was no point in arguing. He sheepishly pulled down his pants. Orjure smiled at him and spread her legs a little bit wider.

  “Oh, you’re not as big ...”

  “I heard what you were saying,” Roderick said, sitting down next to Omnithax. “So, you were Gods once?”

  Omnithax nodded. “We are the children of the stars, made of stuff you have yet to dream of. All the secrets of the cosmos were ours and yet, we were unfulfilled. We were bored.”

  “And you became human?”

  “We wanted the experience.”

  Roderick smiled. He looked over at Jamie, watching him fuck that girl. The blue drug was coursing through his veins. The idea came to him, then.

  “Hurry up!” he called to Jamie. “I got an idea.”

  As ordered, Jamie’s thrusts became harder. Faster. Another few and he had come inside of her as well.

  “What is it?” he asked, zipping up his pants and going back to them. “What’s the idea?”

  “These guys like experience,” Roderick said, smiling at Omnithax. “Well, I think we should give him a real experience.”

  “What do you mean?” Omnithax asked. For the first time since they had known him the smile wilted from his face.

  “Yes. What are you talking about?” Orjure said, walking towards them with semen dripping from between her legs.

  “You have to learn that humans are defined by death,” Roderick told them. It was a lesson Miss Felony had been teaching them since their adoption. The moment we are born we start to die, she would say. It was best to live life to its fullest. No one celebrates the demise of a boring man.

  Jamie looked at his brother. “You don’t mean?”

  “Grab him,” Roderick ordered.

  The two approached Omnithax and held him tight, pulling him to his feet. “Death? But I don’t ...”

  “Think we want that,” Orjure finished.

  “Shut up,” Roderick snapped at her, then he motioned to Jamie to bring him over to the fence. “Come on, buddy. You’re going for a ride.”

  Roderick and Jamie held the boy over the wash, gripping his arms tightly. The boy kicked and screamed but it was no good. The other two were stronger.

  “You want this!” Roderick told Omnithax as he continued to struggle. “You wanted experience! You wanted to know what it’s like to be human!”

  “No,” he shouted. “Not like this!”

  “We do not ...” she began.

  “I told you to SHUT UP!” Roderick snapped at Orjure.

  She fell silent and just watched the scene play out. Orjure was no longer the innocent little girl. Her hair had become wild and stringent. Her eyes were large and bloated with the drug. It was almost possible to see phantom traces of make-up under her eyes and rouge smeared on her cheeks. Her lips were a deeper shade of rose, as if she was wearing lipstick. Her future self, a prostitute of the lowest order, was starting to shine through.

  “Are you ready to fly?” Jamie giggled, finally getting into it. Now he wanted to see this boy fall. He wanted to see this kid die.

  Then Orjure would be theirs. Roderick always had a method to his madness.

  “I’ve seen planets being born!” Omnithax whined. “I’ve floated in the center of crab nebulae! I cannot die! I will not die!”

  “Wanna bet?”

  The wash basin was only a stone’s throw from the trailer park. Two long slabs of concrete lead down into the basin, where rocks had been sharpened by past rains. These were the dog days of summer. The wash was filled with broken glass and angry stones.

  “No, please!” the boy screamed, wriggling in Jamie’s grip. He just held on tighter, his eyes bloated with the power of the drug. Roderick made a fist and punched him, hard enough to draw blood. Droplets spilled into the phantom river below.

  “You can fly,” Jamie told him as they held him over the bridge. “You’re a God, aren’t you? So, get ready to fly!”

  “I can’t fly!” the boy whimpered. “Not anymore! Not anymore!”

  “Then you had better learn,” Roderick said and nodded at Jamie. “Quick.”

  In unison they let him go.

  All three of them watched the body hit the ground. A shower of
dust was thrown up, along with gravel and blood. The boy lay there, dead and naked in the sun.

  “The weak have been exorcised,” Roderick said, turning from the grisly sight. It was a quote from one of the porno movies that Miss Felony used to show them. Even if it made no sense at least it sounded cool. “But my buzz is starting to wear off. We need to get more of that blue stuff.”

  Jamie nodded. “I’m starting to sober up, too.” That was not something he wanted. If anything, he wanted to stay intoxicated forever. If he was sober he might start thinking about all the things he had done. And all the things he might do.