by John Everson
“I have a surprise,” she said, and flounced up the stairs. He heard rustling in the kitchen, drawers opening and closing, the clink of metal on the counter.
She came back down the stairs with her hand behind her back. Dan held his breath as she reached the foot of the cage and brought the hand around. Then he released his lungs with a smile. She was holding a bottle of champagne!
“I thought we should christen it,” she giggled. Placing the stem of the open bottle against her bare, already glistening vagina, she jumped up and down. Foam leaked out of her crack and across her hand to drip like whipped cum on the floor. Then she released the bulk of the pressure and the froth spurted over her face and across Dan's bones. She held the bottle to his lips and he gulped, but still it dribbled down his cheeks. Then she took a swig and set the bottle on the floor. Taking his cock into her mouth still cold from champagne, she quickly fellated his waning muscle to full erection. Then with a twist of the wheel, she had him lying on his back. In a second she was straddling him, gripping the ribs holding him down for balance.
Dan was awash with sensation; the thrill of being held prisoner, the depravity of being touched by bones, the wash of liquor and sex through his body. Melissa was in ecstasy too; she banged her crotch up and down on his pubis prison like a piston. Then she leaned and licked the champagne tears from his cheeks and laughed.
“You like your cage of bones, don’t you Danny?”
He groaned in answer.
“You know you’re a sick fuckin’ bastard.”
He laughed. “You helped.”
“You liked slicing open mommy and daddy for me, didn’t you, Danny?”
“Yeah.”
She moaned pornographically at his reply.
“You got off on it when you put their bodies in the acid, didn’t you?”
Dan laughed as Melissa moaned again at the recollection. “I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stop cumming that night.”
She was whispering and breathing almost frantically. The mouse carcass seemed to jiggle with life independent of her breast, stretching her nipple, clawing its way to and fro across her chest as she moved atop him.
“You always said they held you back, but now they’re really holding you back, Danny. I could climb off you right now and you couldn’t do a thing but wait for me to come back. And maybe I wouldn’t.”
She lifted her vaginal lips from his cock in tease.
“No. Don’t go,” he begged. “Fuck me good.”
“Yeah, you deserve it,” she agreed, lowering herself once more. “You got hard good when you decided to put your mom’s pussy bone between us there didn’t you? I’m surprised you didn’t jizz as soon as you stuck your foot on old daddy Bernie’s head there.”
“I almost did,” he gasped. “I’m gonna cum.”
She increased her pumping, and with mutual wails, they spent themselves. She rolled off him, and then lay in 69 position over the ribs so they could lick each other clean.
They finished the bottle of champagne, and his head was spinning when the buzz began in his ears. It took him a moment to realize the sound was an electric razor. She was standing behind him, and he had a sudden premonition of what was to come.
“No,” he begged. “I told you, not the hair on my head!”
“Sorry Danny,” she said. The mutilated mouse dangled with her breast over his face as she buzzed the hair from the top of his head. Ten minutes later he was staring at his bald head in the mirror she held before him.
It made him hard. She climbed on the table again, rubbing clumps of his thick brown hair over her breasts and between her legs before mounting him. The hair stuck to the sticky mouse blood on her body, covered Dan’s helplessly prone body. They lay together again, a cushion of his detritus between them.
“I don’t know if I like your brother seeing me like this,” she whispered evilly as she began slowly to grind.
“Like what?” he huffed.
“All naked and fffffucking,” she hissed, the words themselves driving her into a frenzy. Her hands gripped the ribs as if she was rattling a chain link fence looking for escape.
“But he’s dead,” Dan said.
“Yeah, but we’re fucking on his mother’s bones. And I don’t think your brother would understand.”
“Understand?”
She shifted position.
“Larry wouldn't have minded watching me fuck. But he wouldn’t understand fucking the dead.”
“You’re fu-uh-uh-uh-king on the dead,” Dan corrected as he approached orgasm.
“No,” she said. “I'm fucking the dead.”
She pulled the razor she had watched Dan disembowel his family with from the raccoon pelt around her middle. His eyes grew wide, but his thrusts more furious as he was both frightened and aroused by the blade.
“You’ve always killed for me, Danny baby, now I’ve got to do it for you.”
“No,” he moaned, pleading and cumming at once.
With each word she struggled to hold back the growing orchestra in her sex. She had a strange smile on her face as she clipped each word:
“I love my mom but if I said to, you would kill her. Oh. Oh. Anything I say, you would do, right?”
“Anything, baby,” he breathed, knowing instantly it was the wrong answer.
“You’d kill rabbits and squirrels and coons and mice and mommy and daddy and sister and brother and oh God, here I cum,” she screamed and brought the razor down on his neck, the blood fountaining across her face as she came in waves of ecstasy and rubbed the fluid across her body. She ripped and flung the furs from her skin and anointed herself in Dan’s blood.
“Then I say die.” She brought the razor down again and again, opened his wrists, opened his belly. His gurgling screams only drove her to another orgasm before his eyes began rolling back in his head and she leaned forward once more to kiss his lips and whisper: “thanks for the best birthday ever, baby.”
It was a few days before Melissa even bothered to get dressed and go home. She’d known she wouldn’t have much time with Dan and had wanted to make the most of it. As she stepped away from the stiffened mess beneath the cage of bones a final time she felt a profound sense of loss. They really had been complementary opposites, she thought.
Dan was as good in death as she was in life.
When editor Pat Nielsen announced that she was closing up shop on Crossroads, a small press magazine with which I’ve enjoyed a longstanding relationship, I wanted to contribute something special for that last issue. I decided the story should be set in Georgia, where the magazine began, and should deal with endings (and beginnings?) at a crossroads. While Pat loved and accepted the story, she ultimately decided not to publish that last issue of the magazine. So here, for the first time, is my “eulogy” for Crossroads.
Dead Girl on the Side of the Road
he girl was blue-faced and cool when I found her, lying there on the side of the road. She was maybe 12 years old and shaping up to be pretty in a few more years. Long auburn hair tangled in the grass where she lay; thin elfin features looked delicate as a porcelain doll’s. And those same features were discolored as if the dye for her eyes had run throughout the mold to ruin the piece. Purple bled along the rim of her eyes, which, thank god, were closed.
I didn’t know what to do. It was near dusk, I was traveling in a rental car on a gravel road in the middle of god-knows-where about an hour outside of Atlanta. My client, four beers happy and eager to please, had sent me down a shortcut to return to my hotel. If I’d gone the long way, I would’ve been there by now. I was about 45 minutes into being solidly lost.
This was only supposed to be a one-day business trip. In and out, get what you need and be back home the next day. Love ’em and leave ’em.
And now, here I was at the crossroads of a gravel intersection in the middle of the country, a dead girl lying at my feet.
I didn’t want to leave her here, but given the stories told about the “hospitality
” of southern police towards Yankees, I also didn’t want to be the one to report her body. They’d keep me in a cell for interrogation for the next three days and if they didn’t like the color of my eyes or the tilt of my chin, maybe never let me out.
I put my hand behind her head, trying to turn her face towards me to get a better look and felt something cool and sticky there. Reflexively, in disgust, I pulled my hand back and her head dropped with a soft thud back to the grass. I saw the dark crimson gel of the girl’s congealed blood slicked across my fingers.
I also saw her eyes pop open. They were green, and flecked with blood. Her lips parted then and I could see a swollen purple tongue within as she started moaning. I pet her forehead with my non-blood-smeared hand and tried to calm her.
“Shhhh,” I whispered. “It’ll be OK.”
My voice cracked on the OK part. The girl was blue and purple, not to mention cool to the touch. In fact, clammy cold. I hadn’t seen her take a breath. I really didn’t think anything was going to be OK for her ever again.
“It hurts,” she mumbled. I could barely understand her, it sounded more like “ith errs,” but I could tell that her voice was high and innocent. And afraid. Now I was really stuck. There was a dying kid at my feet and I couldn’t even consider driving away to leave the body for someone else to find. Someone local.
“Water?” she whispered, her eyes staring into mine with piercing need. I wondered if her brain was hemorrhaging. Or what bones were broken.
“Can you move at all?” I asked, and slowly, carefully, she wiggled her right hand, then her left. Her arms lifted then, and she gripped my shoulders.
“Hurts.”
“I know, baby, I know. We’ve gotta get you some help.”
“Water,” she said again, and then pointed into the trees off the side of the road. “Creek.”
I nodded and went to the car to find something that I could put water in. I didn’t know what good it would do her, but I was selfishly glad for the opportunity to step away from her and think for a minute. There was an empty Coke can in the back from my drive out to the client’s this morning, and I grabbed that and went back to her.
“I don’t know how good the creek water might be,” I cautioned, “but if it’s clear enough, I’ll put some in here for you.”
She smiled and closed her eyes.
I ran into the brush with my can, wondering if she’d still be alive when I got back.
She was. She even held the can herself, drinking it so greedily that some of it washed down the sides of her cheeks to dampen the grass below. When it was gone, she said, “I kin move some.”
She lifted her legs, one at a time, to demonstrate. Her voice was clearer now, soft as peaches and just as southern. The last fiery glow of the sun had completely vanished, so now I could only see by the lights of the idling Ford Escort on the shoulder of the road, but her face seemed to have better color to it; the blue had diminished. I noticed she was very tan.
“My name’s Heather,” she said, and I told her my own.
“John. Who did this to you?”
“Don’t know. I was just walking by the road, on m’ way home. Heard a car and then, you were here.”
She said “you” like “yee-ew,” a drawl that just melted my heart, and I stroked her cheeks with my hands, promising, “Well, we’re gonna get you to a hospital, hon.” But with my touch her eyes seemed to widen and then her arms stretched around my neck.
“Careful, careful,” I said, thinking that her brain might be likely to siphon right out of whatever kind of hole she had in the back of her head, but instead she pulled herself up, fastened her lips to mine and kissed me.
Hard.
With tongue!
I broke her embrace with an explosion of air and a “hey!” and forced her back to the ground. “Whoa, honey,” I said, and she laughed.
“Don’t ya’ll like me?” she pouted, and it occurred to me that her face no longer was discolored at all.
“Honey, I don’t even know you. You’re hurt, you’re a kid, and I’m gonna get you some help.”
“Don’t ya’ll like ’em young?” she asked, winking one eye at me, and suddenly I realized that she wasn’t that young, she’d only looked it. Her breasts were now obviously aroused, her nipples poking through the grass-stained, white t-shirt she wore, supported by a fullness that I hadn’t noticed earlier. Her lips were thick and deep blush pink, the kind that scream “passion” even when they’re dictating the contents of a spreadsheet. I saw that the curve of her hips beneath her cutoff denim shorts was not the angular utilitarian architecture of a pre-teen.
“I’m legal,” she declared, “and I don’t need help. But you kin make me feel better.”
“You’re hurt,” I said, becoming increasingly confused by this whole situation.
She raised herself up on arms that I swear were a good six inches longer than they’d been when I first found her, and with a quick shrug, pulled the t-shirt over her head.
“I’m not hurt, just a little hot,” she purred and thrust her chest in my face. I had to admit, the view was stirring.
“Cool me off?” she asked, and suddenly her hands were undoing my buttons, and we were wrestling for balance. I don’t think I made a conscious decision to allow it, but I didn’t fight too hard either, and suddenly there she was, straddling me in the grass, those soft Southern belle breasts in my hungry mouth and the creamy globes of her ass cupped in my hands.
She fucked like an animal, all teeth and nails and grunting urgency, rolling me down the incline of the ditch ’til we were hidden in a thicket of weeds and sweaty as workmen on a Louisiana chain gang. At some point during the whole thing I realized that I must have completely lost my mind and tried to stop, but she silenced me with her mouth and I entered her for the third time, this time pinning her to the ground with my own need. It seemed to go on for hours, this sucking and grinding and taking and giving. And as I came for the third time, amazing myself with a stamina I’d never had before, she laughed.
It’s amazing how fast a laugh can shrivel a man’s privates, especially when they’re busy doing what God designed them for. But when the laugh sounds more like the cackle of a devil than an angel, well, let’s just say it deflated my ego, among other things.
“Who are you?” I finally asked, breathless and now suddenly a little scared, as her face sneered back at me down the naked ribs of her body, crouched like a dog’s. She wiggled that shapely rear end in my face and drawled, “Just think of me as a friend of the devil.”
She grinned, but there was no humor in her smile.
“Let’s you and me go back up to the car. I’ve got something for ya’ll, I left in my jeans.”
“For me?” I asked, and watched as her haunches jiggled, a perfect Penthouse picture as she strode up the small berm to the road.
I followed her, and watched as she pulled a single sheet of folded paper from the pocket of her shorts. She held it out to me and I took it, unfolding it with a single shake.
“Give me your hand,” she said, and without thinking, as I began to read the paper, I did. She immediately poked my index finger with a small piece of glass plucked from the roadside gravel and I yelled.
“Hey!” I pulled my hand back and sucked at the wound. “What the fuck?”
“Sign it with blood, please.”
The paper was a contract awarding my soul to the devil in exchange for enjoying the pleasures of one Heather Collins. Her body was mine, unchanging, for 25 years to enjoy whenever I chose. At the end of that time, my soul was forfeit.
“You’re Heather,” I asked.
She nodded.
“You’re very good,” I said, “but you’re not worth my soul. And anyway, I don’t think my wife would approve.”
She shrugged, honey curls flouncing down the sides of her beach-brown biceps.
“Your call. You’ve got 5 minutes to decide.”
“And then?”
“And then it’s midnigh
t. And I’m just a dead girl on the side of the road.”
I threw down the paper and gathered my clothes.
“Then I guess you’re going to die again,” I said, starting back towards the car. The moon was high overhead and so bright that I didn’t need the headlights to see how beautiful the girl was that I was walking away from. She was certainly tempting.
“A dead girl with your sperm inside her,” added that smooth Southern voice without expression.
My heart stopped dead.
Could they identify me that way? If they didn’t know I’d been here?
I thought, police can only compare sperm DNA if they’ve got a suspect, right? I tried to convince myself of that, and hurried around to the driver’s side of the car. They’d find a girl, they’d find she’d been raped and run over, but what would make them ever suspect a guy from 1,000 miles away?
Heather stood quietly next to her discarded clothes and watched me back the car away from her. As I turned the wheel to return to the road, I saw the blue LED on the dash read 11:58.
I lined up with the road and threw the car into drive, stomping on the gas and kicking up gravel in a plume behind me.
And there Heather was, bare ass naked and five feet in front of my car in the middle of the road, smiling with a sad look that said, “they never learn.”
I punched the brakes but it was too late. Her face disappeared beneath my hood and I felt the car shudder as I skidded over her body.
I threw the car in park and dove from the seat to see what I had done.
The body of a naked 12-year-old was bleeding all over the road behind me. She was pretty, in a beat-up way, auburn hair wet with blood from the cuts on her forehead. The stones behind her head were quickly darkening. I could see one pale pink nipple that would someday have developed into the spectacular center tease of a gorgeous breast; the other one was hidden beneath a smear of gravel-specked gore where my bumper had caught her.
I cradled her head again in my hands and cried.
“Why me? Why her?” I called out into the silent night. A breeze rippled the grass nearby, and I saw a flash of white, a bit of paper rolling end over end into the ditch to my right. From the throat of the dead girl in front of me, a thick, gurgling voice whispered in frightening monotone:
