Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road

by Keene, Brian

  DEADITE PRESS

  205 NE BRYANT

  PORTLAND, OR 97211

  www.DEADITEPRESS.com

  AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY

  www.ERASERHEADPRESS.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-131-2

  Copyright © 2013 by Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum,

  Brian Keene, Bryan Smith, J. F. Gonzalez, Wrath James White,

  Nate Southard, Ryan Harding and Shane McKenzie

  Cover art copyright © 2013 Nick Gucker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to collectively thank Tom Piccirilli, Michelle Scalise, Jeff Burk, Rose O’Keefe, Carlton Mellick, Alan M. Clark, and the staffs of Deadite Press and Sinister Grin Press.

  Extra-special thanks to Monica J. O’Rourke, Mark “Dezm” Sylva, Tod Clark, and Stephen “Macker” McDornell for their invaluable help with this project.

  For Tom Piccirilli …

  * * *

  Prologue - Edward Lee

  The taste was unmistakable; there could be no doubt—not to a palate with Nicci’s incontestable track record.

  It was the taste of sperm.

  That FUCKER! she thought in a blare like a mental truck horn. The acknowledgment sprang her bolt-upright in bed. She smacked her lips, gagged, grimaced, and then—

  Kurrrrrrr-HOCK!

  —spat with a vengeance right onto the carpet. Appalled, she clicked on the light.

  Did he really … could he possibly have…? The actuality of what she suspected seemed—now that she’d been awake for several moments—incredulous. Couldn’t it be, instead, that the awful, awful taste in her mouth was something else? Nasal drip? Cottonmouth from the eight beers she’d chugged while Sam was at work? Or a tiny burp of bile that had come up in her sleep? After all, she’d had the rest of the leftover kung pao that had been in the fridge for a few days. Nicci hoped for all she was worth that something like this was the case, but …

  But …

  For fuck’s sake. Who am I kidding? If anybody knows what cum tastes like, it’s me.

  Yes, it was she, all right. If anyone knew, it was Nicci. Her indoctrination into fellatio as a means of boosting her income had been gradual. A blowjob or two per week at fifteen or twenty a pop really helped out. She’d do mainly dorky mall guys after work: the security guard, the two janitors, and a couple more guys who jacked fries and flipped burgers at the food court, plus their friends. See, Nicci only made minimum wage at the Corn Dog Dee-Lites stall, and minimum wage was not enough to pay Jenny, her roommate, her cut of the rent, plus food, plus the endless fees, fines, and “re-acclimation” class charges for the DUI that had wrecked her Fusion and separated her from her license. Jenny had been Nicci’s best friend since grade school, so splitting an apartment seemed an ideal move to make.

  A less-than-ideal move to make was fucking Talbot behind Jenny’s back. Talbot was Jenny’s fiancé, and he was big, muscular, handsome, and none-too-bright—quite a befitting match for Nicci. His cock couldn’t really have been the size of a can of tennis balls but it sure felt like it. Talbot had a tendency to whisper romantic endearments while he was putting the blocks to her (“Aw, fuck, baby, your pussy’s tighter than a bull’s ass in fly season” was an example, which Nicci found very endearing), and in this selfish, cynical age, romantic endearments were a precious thing indeed, and a welcome verification of love. Plus, Talbot’s preposterously large erection made Nicci feel like an overstuffed turkey at Thanksgiving, and, well, she liked that feeling. Jenny had no clue what was going on (why should she? Nicci was her best friend! A best friend doesn’t fuck your fiancé!) while in the meantime, Nicci upped her oral-sex quotient from one or two per week to five or ten, because poor Talbot only had a part-time job while he was at community college, and with tuition and book costs on a constant rise, he needed help.

  On the big day, Nicci had been gargling with Listerine—she always did upon her return from work—when the front door slammed so hard the entire apartment shook.

  “That scumbag,” came Jenny’s whining bellow. “That no good, lying piece of shit!”

  Nicci rushed to the kitchen and made the logical enquiry: “Jenny, what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong?” Her friend’s voice cracked. “I’ve been giving that muscle-head fiancé of mine $100 a week to help with his college expenses, and you wanna know what I found out today? He’s never been in college! He never even registered!”

  This information didn’t sit well with Nicci either, for she’d been giving Talbot the same amount and sometimes more. Therefore, she made the next logical enquiry: “If he hasn’t been spending the money on college, what has he been spending it on?”

  “This!” Jenny blurted and slammed something down on the counter. When her hand came away, the material proof of the secret was made plain: a stack of bet cards from the horse track, a thick stack, held together with a rubber band, and most for $50 place-and-show bets. All losers.

  “Gambling?” Nicci deduced, for perceptivity was not her forte.

  “Of course, gambling! And not just horses but greyhounds, roulette, craps, cards, and some shit called harness racing! I found a whole bag of track forms and casino receipts in his apartment. Now I know why he never gave me a key!”

  “If he never gave you a key, how’d you get in?”

  “I broke in, and it’s a damn good thing I did, ’cos now I know the truth! My fiancé is a gambling addict! Of all the lowlife things to be!”

  Nicci could think of numerous things more “lowlife” than that: like sucking dick for money, like fucking your best friend’s guy. She proverbially shuddered to think what Jenny’s reaction might be if she discovered the truth. But there’s no way in hell that could ever happen. She felt assured. Talbot never pounded her sod in either apartment, only in his car.

  “And it gets worse! Look what I found in his car!” And then Jenny pulled something out of her jeans pocket. She held it pinched between thumb and index finger, right in front of Nicci’s eyes.

  It was a foil packet, about one-and-a-half inches square. It read Lifestyles - Ribbed - Ultra Sensitive - Magnum!

  Spittle flew from Jenny’s lips. “A fuckin’ empty rubber packet!”

  Nicci knew what it was—any girl would in this day and age. But the reason a few beads of sweat popped out around her neckline was because Nicci easily recognized the brand. It was one of the packets from the twelve-box she had bought for Talbot.

  “That two-timing pile of fuck has been fucking someone else behind my back!” Jenny’s face, by now, had transformed to the color of a cooked lobster. “When I get my fuckin’ hands on that fuckin’ slime bucket, I’m gonna fuck him up so fuckin’ much he won’t know what fuckin’ hit him! I’ll kick him in the cock so hard his dick-knob’ll be sticking out his asshole!”

  Here was a side of Jenny that Nicci was totally unfamiliar with. Her roommate looked as though the rising pressure of her outrage would cause her face to start percolating. And then, in the space of a blink—

  “Oh my God, Nicci, what am I gonna do?” Jenny began to blubber, and then her face fell into her hands and the waterworks began. “I love him so much! Where did I go wrong?”


  A situation this complicated left Nicci useless as far as advice and consolation went. All she could think to say was, “There, there, don’t worry,” and all she could think to do was get a Kleenex as her friend began to hitch, choke, sniffle, and sob unrestrainedly.

  But the tissue box on the kitchen counter was empty. Ah, but I have some in my purse, she reminded herself, in one of those little travel packs. She retrieved her purse opened it, and—

  fwap!

  The purse had slipped out of her hand and fallen to the floor, and once it hit, a most telling thing was ejected: a veritable ribbon of Lifestyles - Ribbed - Ultra Sensitive - Magnum! condoms.

  Jenny’s sobs abated rather quickly, for her gaze was at the floor. Then she looked to Nicci, then back to the floor, and then back to Nicci again.

  Only the most hackneyed response found its way past Nicci’s lips: “Jenny, it’s not what you think!”

  To make a long story mercifully short, before Jenny kicked Nicci’s ass out of the apartment, she just … kicked Nicci’s ass. Her vociferations need not be repeated here, nor do the specific details of the ass-kicking, save to say that her dual black eyes made Nicci appear quite racoonish.

  Nicci moved in with Talbot, but this cohabitation was not long-lived. Evidently, his gambling problem was bigger than she could have guessed, and Talbot was eventually found hanging upside-down in an abandoned filling station garage. His impressive genitalia had been cut off with shingle shears, relocated to his mouth, and ramrodded up his throat—yes, up his throat instead of down his throat because this action had taken place after he’d been hung upside-down by a meat hook through his anus—and into his duodenum with a broom handle. She’d heard oblique references to a “big tally” and a “marker” and Talbot “screw-jobbing” a loan shark named “Piccirilli” who worked for a man named “Vinchetti.” Nicci could scarcely contemplate these peculiar oddments of the situation; she had more to worry about anyway.

  A week later, she was laid off at Corn Dog Dee-Lites, which forced her to escalate her blowjob quotient all the more. Soon, word got around to every oddball who worked at the mall that the “air-head chick who used to work the corn-dog joint does a primo pole-smoke for twenty,” and for a short time, Nicci became quite an entrepreneur, until that last oddball turned out to be a US Marshal. She was not surprised that the undercover schmuck had waited until after he’d come in her mouth to inform her that she was under arrest.

  Unable to make bail, she was sentenced to thirty days in the county detention center, and the experiences she encountered there—in what prison parlance dubbed The Lezzie Lounge—are better left to the imagination.

  This lengthy narrative, then: to authenticate the sheer expertise of Nicci’s ability to identifying the taste of semen …

  Her brother, Sam, by the way, happened to be a guard in the same detention facility that had served as Nicci’s abode for those thirty punitive days. Sam was an aloof smart-ass, a weirdo and a loner, an inveterate porn-surfer, and, well, a dick, but at least he was decent enough to respect the bond of common blood. After a plethora of snide jokes, he offered his shiftless sister a temporary place to live while she sought new employment.

  And now?

  Back to the conundrum, that of Nicci’s awakening abruptly to find her mouth rife with the taste of sperm. The consideration offered no avenues of question: there was only one person who could’ve made such a perverse deposit, and worse, now that the bedside light was on, when she looked down at her nude body (Nicci always slept in statu quo nuditum), the long lines of pearlescent slime made it clear that Sam had not only ejaculated in her mouth but all over her. And, wow. He comes enough for five guys, she thought, judging by the sheer copiousness of the deposit.

  Her fury had her up, out of bed, and hauling on her robe in moments. She thunked barefoot down the hall, bypassing Sam’s bedroom (because he slept during the day), and then thunked down the stairs. In the foyer, though, she stopped.

  Did she … smell something? Just a trace, but a trace of something awful.

  She passed it off (a mouse probably died) and next was making her way through darkness, down the side hall, to where she knew Sam would be: the den, the room where he had his computer and where he often sat for hours scouring porn sites and obligatorily masturbating—she’d heard him in there many times, and had seen the telltale wads of Kleenex in the waste can while cleaning the room. Guess he decided to jerk off on his sister’s face this time, instead of the tissue, she fumed. She’d caught glimpses of the sites in the past, sites with names like We Are Hairy, Furburger Floozies, Big Bush Bitches (evidently he had a thing for pubic hair), and it came as no surprise when she noticed the line of fluorescent light in the gap under the door.

  “I’m really pissed, Sam!” she warned, and banged the door open.

  Her brother wasn’t there. The lights glared, the computer was on, but no Sam. Fleshy movement on the monitor snagged her eye; ordinarily she wouldn’t have cared but—

  What on EARTH?

  It had been impossible for her not to notice the element of incongruity on the chisel-sharp screen: the image of a bald man inserting his entire foot into an obese woman’s vaginal vault. Nicci’s jaw dropped as she stared. No, no, no! she thought for each inch the foot went in. Then the ankle. Then—

  “No!”

  She scrolled the image away when the first six inches of the man’s shin had disappeared into the mammoth crevasse of cookie-dough-white human blubber.

  What is this shit?

  What she’d scrolled to was worse, and worse after that. At the next one, Nicci’s stomach did a single hard pump, like a bellows, and she tumbled backward just one pulse away from throwing up. She stumbled more than walked out of the den; so nauseating were the images that she felt dizzy enough to faint. When she’d caught her breath in the dark hallway, her bewilderment socked home. My brother’s worse than a pervert. He’s plain and simple sick in the head! Nicci had heard of off-the-wall porn sites, but this was beyond the pale. On the rare occasions in the past when she’d seen the stuff he was so engrossed in, it was what she could only think of as normal porn, cum-shot compilations, group sex, and an inordinate array of large-busted women displaying abundantly furred pubic plots, but never anything even close to what she’d just seen. Only someone with a serious sexual abnormality would be aroused by such full-tilt misogynistic filth.

  A hand landed on her shoulder. “Hey, Sis—”

  Nicci shrieked, her heart seeming to stop. The shriek rose and rose, sharpening like a blade, so much that even her own eardrums began to hurt. It was only her brother, of course, returning from the kitchen with a can of soda. When Nicci turned, a hand clenched to her chest, Sam grimaced and ground his teeth at the cacophony.

  “Damn, Nicci,” he bellowed. “Pipe down! You’re gonna crack all the windows!”

  “You scared the ever-loving fuck out of me!” she bellowed back.

  “Well, what are you doing sneaking around in the middle of the night?”

  The shock’s adrenalin began to subside, only to be replaced by rage. “I was looking for you, you sick fuck! I saw that twisted shit you were looking at online! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

  Sam’s face lengthened in hilarity. “You suck more dicks than a busload of crack whores and I should be ashamed?”

  “Shut up! You know what I’m talking about!”

  “Actually, no, Nicci, I don’t. But here’s what I do know. My sister has had more dicks in her mouth than Charlie Sheen’s had champagne. Now that’s a lot of dicks!” And then he roared laughter.

  Nicci hated it when he reminded her of how she used to make money. “Fuck you! You’re just trying to change the topic—”

  “Just how many dicks did you suck in your illustrious career? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  “Shut up!”

  “You know, I’ll bet if you measured every dick that’s been in your mouth and added them all together, it would be enough to go around the
world!”

  “Fucker!”

  “Twice!”

  Now Nicci yelled at a volume that seemed sub-human. “I know what you did upstairs!”

  “Did up—”

  “And now I know how sick in the head you really are because I just got an eyeful of that disgusting porn you’ve been looking at! It’s sickening!”

  A puzzled expression came over Sam’s face. “Babes with Big Bushes Dot Com? Well, all right, I’m attracted to chicks with pubic hair—none of this clichéd shaved shit, ya know? But what’s the big deal with that? You’re acting like I was looking at kiddie porn.”

  “That shit in there is almost as bad!” Nicci continued to yell. “Really, Sam! Japanese girls eating each other’s upchuck? Those redneck-looking men making the crippled girl lick a cow’s asshole? And then the one with that guy who looks like Elton John pumping turds into a woman’s vagina with a fucking toilet plunger? I almost threw up!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He turned, grabbed Nicci’s arm, and marched her into the den. “I don’t go to sick-pup websites like that. See?”

  Sam’s mouth fell open when he looked at the screen, where he glimpsed no evidence of Babes with Big Bushes. Instead he saw a fat man blowing his nose into a girl’s mouth, after which the girl swallowed, groaned, and opened her mouth for more.

  “Fuck!” Sam clicked the website off. “That’s not my site—”

  “Yeah, right!”

  “Nicci. Listen to me. I did not go to that website. I don’t wanna see sick stuff like that.”

  She stood hands on hips, tapping a bare foot on the hallway carpet. “Gimme a break. If you didn’t go to the site, then who did? The good fucking fairies?”

  “It must be a pop-up, you ninny, or one of those viruses that jumps you to other sites. A hopper virus is what they’re called.”

  The remark very quickly tamped down some of Nicci’s hostility. “Pop-ups? Viruses?”

  “Yeah, pop-ups, viruses. If you had a computer like everyone else in the world, you’d know what I was talking about. Honestly, Nicci, you’ve sucked so many dicks you must have dick for brains now.”