Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road

by Keene, Brian

  He looked up sharply from his reverie. It was difficult to say if he was startled given that the bulging eyes seemed to be a permanent feature, but she’d gotten through to him without question.

  Then more urban scenery passed them by, about as noticeable as a faded painting in the room of a rundown motel. Arrianne’s feet worked the brake and accelerator as needed, almost independently of her mind. She’d slid out of both shoes without realizing it and nudged them out of the way, her toes digging into the thin carpet of the floor mat just for the friction. The polish changed color depending on sunlight. They had been purple at Wally’s but were now a light shade of blue. She bit her lip, wondering if she needed to prod him again with another threat about kicking him out, but he finally rewarded her request.

  “We were at this village. Seemed like we always found them the day after we’d seen some action too. Some of them were in with the North. Had to be. That close to the shit, man, no doubt about it. But the gooks, they’d just look at us like we had a dick growing out of our forehead. ‘No, GI, we not VC.’ The hell they weren’t. We had two or three guys from the platoon in body bags, and we just decided the next village was VC even if they were wearing Stars and Stripes underwear and using Ho Chi Minh photos to wipe their ass. Had ’em all dragged out of the huts, several of them in a line. A bunch of mama-sans were leading the chorus, the usual shit, swearing up and down they no VC. Fuckin’ Hodson, he’s got like a billion-yard stare in his eyes and more importantly an M2 flamethrower, and he just opens up on the whole row of those zipperheads. A solid sheet of flame, we’re talking a human brushfire of old ladies, husbands and wives, little kids incinerated. No young men though. They weren’t VC, no way, but the strongest people they coulda had were nowhere to be found … except probably in a tunnel somewhere with an AK-47, a bowl of rice, and a mommy, daddy, and granny beaucoup flambéed.”

  It was the weirdest thing, but Arrianne thought she could even smell the stench of burning death. Perhaps in the throes of her lust it was easy enough to convert the reek of her passenger to that of a smoldering corpse pile. All those people burned up in an instant. She felt light spasms between her legs. Each time she inhaled seemed to bring the massacre closer to her, like a shimmering mirage.

  “Less screaming than you’d expect,” Brad continued. “When you’re completely wrapped in fire like that, your lungs blow out. That’s what Doc said. Rice paddies not half a click away, but they didn’t have a chance. Water, water everywhere and not a drop for dinks. I think Bennett said that and we all laughed. Some of them were still running around like headless chickens and we laughed anyway. Had to put them down if they got too close. They couldn’t see where they were going, but they flat picked ’em up and set ’em down in a hurry, like they could get away from it somehow. No dice. Someone puked from the smell of burning hair and flesh. I think it was Cooper. All that fire liquefied the sandals on some of them, like little oil slicks. Charred husks everywhere you looked, probably thirty of them with their fucked-up teeth. Wasn’t no Colgate in Agent Orange.”

  Brad paused to fumble around inside his mouth again, as if the mention of teeth had triggered the impulse. Something seemed to snap into place.

  It distracted Arrianne momentarily, agitated her, but he thankfully resumed the narrative.

  “Hodson never laughed. When they all stopped moving and were just smoldering out there in the sun, he lit them up again. It was miserably hot, but he didn’t care. Felt like a hundred twenty degrees. Then Murphy walked out of a hut with a bag in his hand, holding it over his head like a trophy. We couldn’t believe it. Marshmallows. He saw some of those bodies ablaze again and proceeded to stick a marshmallow on a twig and hold it over the flame. One of those mama-sans, I think. He stood there and roasted a marshmallow off her burning corpse. Those scorched bodies were everywhere, and you wouldn’t believe the stench. I didn’t think I’d ever stop smelling it. I still wake up sometimes thinking it’s happening again. Coop puked a second time. We just watched Murphy do it, grinning at us the whole time and eating it like the finest steak ever cooked, but I know we were all thinking the same thing … where the hell had the gooks gotten those marshmallows?”

  He finally looked over at Arrianne as though he hoped he could solve this ageless mystery.

  “From the VC?” she suggested.

  He nodded. “There it is. We threw a bunch of playing cards on those bodies. One of them—it had to be a kid because it was so small—Murphy slammed a boot right into the chest and it went right through, all the way to the ground. He booted its head clean off. A couple of guys kicked it around, but I didn’t. It was way too hot. Someone put a Coke can in what was left of somebody’s hands. It looked hilarious. No one had a camera, though.”

  Brad’s face hardened. “Then I came back to the world and a bunch of long-hairs spit on me and called me a baby killer. I never killed no babies. I just watched the other guys do it. Some gratitude for serving, I tell you what.”

  Arrianne noticed with mild surprise but no concern at all that she did not recognize the area they were in now. It was rural farmlands, and she’d maneuvered them off the main roads. There had been the occasional car in the oncoming lane, but nothing in her own for the last few miles. She’d driven past her turn-off toward Stirrup Iron Road since she had no intention of taking him back home. A shame because he probably had several more hot stories like this one. It could be like 1001 Arabian Nights, albeit with more corpses and carnage.

  Still, she had to ask, “If all that killing was just like breathing, why are you so worried about hell?”

  He looked at her again, the eyes now brimming with obvious madness again. “Because it was like breathing. Because when something like that is normal to you, you’re lost forever. No, those things want me, all right.”

  Arrianne pulled over abruptly. There was only the merest shoulder on this stretch of road, and most of the car dipped down into the slope of land beside the asphalt. She put it in park, freed her seat belt from the clasp, and swiveled to face him. “They’re not the only ones who want you, Ben.”

  “My name is—”

  “Shut the fuck up. Let me talk.”

  There shouldn’t have been any shift in the balance of power. He was a former soldier, a killer who was quite possibly psychotic. Her fearlessness seemed to take him aback, though, as if he recognized one of his own. He stared back at his folded hands again.

  “Look at me, Ben.”

  He lifted his head and turned it to her very slowly, as though a knife had been plunged into the side of his neck.

  “I liked your story. It got me extremely hot, and I am sitting in a puddle right now. You reek like someone’s asshole baked in an oven, and I keep thinking I’m going to throw up from the godforsaken stench from you, but I like it and it turns me on. Do you understand that?”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly, clearly not understanding.

  “Sure you don’t. It doesn’t matter. Riddle me this, though, Ben … what was the prettiest pussy you ever saw in your life? A girl in Playboy? A high school sweetheart?” She smiled cruelly as a thought occurred to her. “Your mama’s?”

  She saw a sliver of his tongue as he licked his lips through the mesh of his beard. “It was … immaculate,” he said with true reverence. His eyes glazed over. He looked directly at her without seeing her anymore. “Fuzz barely thicker than a peach. The lips were like the petals off a tulip. It was perfect in every way, planted between the smoothest thighs.” He smiled warmly at the memory.

  “And who was she, Ben?”

  He shrugged. “Hell if I know, ma’am. Just some gook girl who tripped a Claymore. Blew her into a good five fuckin’ pieces and shredded that sackcloth thing she was wearing into another thousand. The knees up to the waist were okay. Her guts were strewn from her waist to her torso for a good three yards, but all I saw was that amazing cunt. No one had a camera that day, either. Damn the luck.”

  The image should have repulsed her. She under
stood this, but only in the most rudimentary fashion. Mostly there was just the thrill of the forbidden. Even so, she needed a slightly different tack. “And what about when you actually crammed your rock-hard dick into a girl’s pussy, Ben? What was the most spectacular of them all? The one you still sometimes dream about and wake up with about a pint of cum in your shorts?”

  “Well, I’d have to say it was that same girl, ma’am. Like I said, the knees to the waist were okay, and a couple of us took a turn. Coop puked over that too, but he went third. I went after him. I think I’d have blasted the top of her skull apart if it had all still been attached. I came like a mortar shell. That was probably my best day in ’Nam, when you get down to it.”

  “You … you screwed the lower half of that girl’s body?” God, that was so hot. Her thighs rubbed together as she ground her ass into the seat, nudging her sex against the cushion, massaging.

  “Well, yeah. And the head too. Hodson went first cuz it was his Claymore, so he got dibs, but it was taking him forever. We were trying to pass the time, and then Murphy goes, ‘Hey, look what I found.’ It was the head and neck, of course. So the rest of us got down to brass tacks with passing it around and humping it. Doc claimed by the third dick that our loads were dripping out of the neck like an IV, but I didn’t see—”

  Arrianne touched a finger to his lips to shush him, harder than she’d intended. Something jostled loose. The top row of his teeth slipped through his lips. She caught it in her palm before he could snatch them. She smacked his hand. “All good things to those who wait, soldier boy. And if you haven’t had anything to compare to that girl all those years ago, you’ve waited way too long.”

  She unbuttoned her capris and slid them down her thighs, never relinquishing the row of his false teeth. She slid her right leg completely out . She had maneuvered herself so that her back faced the driver’s side door, her right leg bent with the knee prodding the back of her seat and the left as apart from it as the steering wheel and console would allow.

  The bulge of Brad’s eyes now expressed as much surprise as lunacy. He raptly stared between her thighs at the beige crotch of her panties, like it was some sort of vortex funneling him down into oblivion and a complete loss of self. She glanced down. No, they weren’t see-through from her wetness but soaked all the same. She curled her fingers beneath the fabric at her thigh and yanked them to the side. She felt even hotter with the underwear pulled away.

  “Isn’t this so much better than some pathetic dead girl’s quim? Wet and alive, instead of cold and rotting?”

  He may have nodded, but it was difficult to say; he was transfixed. The puppy stood on her hind legs in the backseat, forepaws on the crate, yipping, and Dickey barked as though he should get in on the act as well, a sound like a gunshot in the sealed confines of the car. Brad didn’t notice at all. His breath came out in labored gasps, like a woman doing Lamaze, a steady stream of halitosis blowing into her nostrils.

  Arrianne opened her fingers enough to reveal his teeth. They managed to break through his trance, and he instinctively reached for them.

  She clenched her fingers closed again. “Ah-ah-ah,” she chided. “I’m not done with them yet. Watch.”

  The row of teeth effortlessly slid into her vagina, the opening so slick she wouldn’t have been surprised if she could have pushed all her fingers inside to the knuckles—maybe her whole hand.

  Brad stared in amazement like a kid whose mind had been blown by a disappearing coin trick. It didn’t fit snugly with the jagged arch, but the discomfort of the sensation was wonderfully immediate, his look of astonishment empowering.

  “God, I need to cum,” she said. She slipped her fingers down between her legs, rubbing her clit in quick circles, knowing exactly how fast and how much pressure she needed. It didn’t take long at all, between that and the alien feel of his teeth inside her, his breath a wretched fog blowing hotly into her face. She could picture him gnawing at the guts of road kill, slobbering over it like a starving dog. She cried out inside of a minute, her thighs clenching as the spasms rolled through her. Her head twisted against the window until the waves of pleasure subsided. She exhaled in a long rush, chilled sweat dripping down the back of her neck. Her thighs unclenched. She felt like she could melt into the floorboards.

  The teeth now irritated her in the wake of orgasm.

  Brad watched attentively as if he expected something else to emerge from the magic box. It was merely his teeth though, glistening like they had been coated in petroleum jelly from her juices. He reached for them, and again she slapped his hand away.

  “Open,” she said. She pointed to his lips when he gave her a befuddled look.

  His lower lip dropped uncertainly, and Arrianne pushed the slippery teeth back into his mouth.

  Chapter Thirteen - Ryan Harding and Bryan Smith

  Arrianne still wasn’t home when Chuck returned.

  Thank Christ.

  No telling where she’d gone, but she could take her time. He still wasn’t sure what he’d say to her about last night. It wasn’t something you could just let lie, could you, the elephant in the room?

  An elephant desperate to be puked on for sexual gratification.

  He winced as he loosened his tie. How does someone even discover a fascination in something like that? Maybe he was better off not knowing. If he saw someone throw up, he was always right there on the verge of joining them. Setting up a vomitorium in the bedroom definitely wasn’t Chuck’s idea of ball-draining excitement. It was a crying shame, because the other stuff was top notch, firing on all dick-sucking and ass-fucking cylinders. Why did she suddenly have to get all weird with him?

  He found a hanger for his tie in the closet and slipped the fashion noose on the hook with the others. He kept them all pre-tied so he didn’t have to fool with them for minutes at a time. He thought he’d left them behind altogether when he switched to telecommuting, but he still had clients who wanted face-to-face meetings if they were within a reasonable distance. He was grateful for the distraction today. He probably would have invented a meeting just to avoid the house for most of the day. Although it occurred to him that maybe he wouldn’t have had to. He’d only returned home the night before and was supposed to be staying away for a few nights.

  It was bizarre how she’d lashed out at him when they’d first moved in and she found all those sick sites with the bums on the computer. He now had to accept that she’d just been trying to feel him out on it to see if he’d been into it at all. She’d really sold her disgust, though; she’d have been nominated alongside Meryl Streep if it were a movie. Did she really think he’d say, “Hell, I don’t think it’s all that bad—it’s even kind of hot how he puked in that hefty woman’s face and shot his payload into the chunks”? With her level of indignation, he would have agreed with her even if he hadn’t been sickened by the scene, although he most certainly had been.

  She’d even put it on his computer. He’d take a sledge hammer to the hard drive now before he’d ever take it to any repair place. Those people undoubtedly saw some crazy porn shit every day, but probably just comparably wholesome stuff like bukkake or some dog-on-girl clips that someone checked out simply because he knew it had to exist online somewhere. The same reason he’d watched 2 Girls 1 Cup. He didn’t think for a minute it would turn him on, but once he knew it was out there, how could he not look?

  He considered himself fairly vanilla when it came to the bedroom. He’d entertained the thought of anal sex with Arrianne of course, but she’d quickly shot down that possibility with record speed years ago, and he decided he’d just have to nurture that fantasy on his own. He had a couple of pornos stashed away to help out with that. A few volumes of Analrama were really all he needed (“Four hours at a whack!” the jumbo boxes proclaimed). A scene here and there on his laptop did the trick. It wasn’t like Twin Peaks or something with a continuing storyline you had to follow. You just blew your load and hit the bricks.

  He went back downst
airs and spotted Arrianne’s laptop on the living room couch. It was in hibernate mode.

  Hey … I gotta know.

  Chuck woke it up. Married couples needed their secrets—he had Flavia and Analrama, after all—but all bets were off with this. What if it was even worse than what she’d loaded on his computer? That didn’t seem possible, but why would she start him out with the hardest stuff if it was intended to be a gateway drug to puketopia?

  She had several tabs of filth open on her browser. He sighed, now as depressed as he was disgusted. The first was actually kind of tame. It was called Bum’s Rush. It was a candid camera operation where the “host” paid obviously homeless people to haul down a pretty woman’s skirt or rip open her blouse to reveal the goodies beneath and then run for the hills while spy cameras immortalized it all. It was kind of funny how the women reacted, and funnier still when someone with quick reflexes managed to snatch a hobo’s sleeve and blast him with pepper spray before he could get away. The host caught as much as he could of that and then surreptitiously evacuated the premises when some concerned bystanders threw the shrieking bum a boot party. That one had the most “likes” of the clips.

  The doorbell rang. Chuck felt a spike of panic and had to remind himself he was alone in the house. Arrianne could return any minute though, and with the fourteen missed calls on his phone this afternoon alone, he had a legitimate reason to worry.

  Fourteen missed calls, he thought. I must have had my phone on mute. Dumbass! Please, God, don’t let it be Flavia.

  Logically he knew she had no idea where he lived, either before they’d moved to Stirrup Iron Road and now, but he had this nightmare premonition that she’d be waiting for him and only too happy to hang around until Arrianne returned.

  As he crept to the door, trying not to make any noise, he had a moment to marvel at the irony of being scared that his wife with a secret double life of emetic erotica would find out that he’d had a very normal affair with a beautiful woman. He checked through the peephole and sighed with relief.