Then she puckered a pathway of suction-cup kisses down to the respectable obelisk I’d raised in honour of her tender ministrations.
She dislocated her jaw like a snake and got her mouth down on me.
Believe it or not, I knew what she was up to while she was going down on me. It was all a con. She’d screw me into unconsciousness and take me for whatever I had. I still figured I was getting the best of the deal.
It was all worth it.
Money could be made and remade.
Moments like this were priceless. They demanded to be soaked up.
Absorbed.
For a time there was nothing but wet sucking noises. I leaned back into the cockroach feces-ed pillow, preparing to gentlemanly shoot her a mouthful of creamy pollywogs.
“Hey Nobody.”
I looked up into a very long and hollow tube of metal. A pistol, but from this perspective it looked like an ambitious cannon, pointed directly at my face, right about nose level.
Shit.
A set-up.
I opened wide and ate the gun. I caught it between my teeth and rolled, using my weight and praying his finger wasn’t too attached to the trigger.
First date or not, I don’t swallow.
It was a good plan, as reflex actions go.
The only problem was Hoover-girl.
She just wouldn’t let go.
So I grabbed the pistol and twisted it away from the gunman’s sweaty hand. I kneed myself up on the rusted hotel mattress springs, yanked the gun out of my mouth and squeezed the trigger, airing out the gunman’s brains.
Only it was me that felt the shooting pain as Hoover-girl bit down. She must have been part pit bull, raised on hard tack and chewy beef jerky, because she just wasn’t letting go.
So I shot her in the leg. Her head would have been faster, but I didn’t want to risk hitting anything important. It was fifty-fifty for the longest heartbeat of my life. Was she going to open her mouth, or bite down all the way?
She bit down. My luck was running true to form. I jammed the gun against her chest and shot her where her heart ought to have been.
Then the three behind me stepped out of the shadows and pistol-whipped me to sleep. I fell down onto the mattress, dreaming of myopic face-sucking, zit-busting, puss-drinking aliens.
~ * ~
I woke up close to the river. The river stank impossibly, but it wasn’t dying. I wish I could say the same thing for myself, but it just didn’t look that good for me right now.
I didn’t care.
I’ve never been afraid of death. Dying soon seemed like a good way to avoid that mid-forty striptease that flenses the muscle from a man’s bones and replaces it with a swaddle of grey and spongy, useless flab. That’s the circus of life, isn’t it? We’re stood up and knocked down, caught like flies in the crossfire of the carrot and the stick.
I recognized the geography from the industrial side of the city. The squalid, grey-toned sludge hives crawling with worker drones, punch-clocked and wage-slaved, making whatever the machines told them to make and funneling whatever was left straight down into the river.
The river didn’t care. It sat there and soaked up everything we dumped into it. Toxic waste and nuclear fishing. A potage of non-biodegradable putrescence, all bulging into a huge toxic waistline that wrapped around the city.
I blinked clear of the dreamland I’d been sinking into. A fresh shooting groin pain, like knitting needle acupuncture, aided the process.
I looked down. She was still there, clamped down in death. They’d decapitated her. It looked like they’d used a fire axe, judging from the raggedness of the wound.
I wondered if you could call a decapitation a wound?
What else would you call it?
They’d left her hanging there, like a pale-fleshed, nearly bloodless cock ring. I guess they hadn’t been able to work the head free. Maybe they hadn’t even tried. I suppose I couldn’t blame them.
I tried to stand up, but somebody slugged me in the face with a fistful of gravity and peace. I resented that greatly, but his knee was on my throat, so I thought of Ghandi and cooperated.
There were three of them; working a leg manacle around my left ankle. The manacle was attached to three feet of rusty, big-linked chain, and a hefty anchor. John Wayne never had days like this. He always beat the bad guys, punching them with his dukes or shooting them full of lead or treating them to a long horn enema, clean and simple.
The same thing with Batman.
Biff – Zap – Powie!
He’d knock the Joker out one more time.
You’d think he’d have broken out a tooth just once.
And then the Joker’s henchmen would hold up their hands and Robin would march them off to jail, where they’d be bent and therapeutically cornholed by smiling, friendly prison guards until the next episode rolled around.
That was how it was supposed to go. You knocked down the leader, blew his fucking head off, and then the henchmen wouldn’t know what to do next.
Sheep without a shepherd, a snake with its head knocked off, but that was for other heroes. That wasn’t the way of Captain Nothing.
Shit.
I was talking in the third person.
Never a good sign.
I’d better hit someone fast.
One of them held my leg, while the other raised a small sledgehammer to drive the kingbolt home on the shackle. I kicked out. They missed with the sledge, hitting the side of the shackle. My leg sung like a damaged tenor. I felt the shackle deform beneath the blow. A shard of steel wired out and shot into the meat above my ankle bone.
Everything went numb, which was a blessing, given the decapitation that was dangling from my dick-meat. They re-aimed the hammer and drove the kingbolt home. I was shackled to an anchor, and wearing a dead skull meat fob.
I figured this qualified for serious deep shit.
I looked up at the one with his knee in my throat.
“Why?” I croaked out.
He gave me a grin.
This was when they’d stop and tell me what had happened, and I’d have time enough to come up with a plan to save the day.
“Why the fuck not?” he answered.
And then they rolled me into the river.
There’s something about falling into a dirty river that just begs for a scream. It was foul and thick and cold and greasy; swallowing me, sucking me under. That’s the scary thing about water. Kicking and not getting your footing sunk into anything but god knew how many more fathoms of water.
I was holding my breath, trying not to choke, trying not to swallow the dirty water. Hopeless. The anchor was still pulling me down.
It happened fast; the streetlights hollowing up into black, and then I was down so deep there was nothing left but nothing. A bit of condom floated past, life trapped in a latex sock, I kicked with one foot but the other was caught in the anchor and the skull that dangled from my swinger seemed to laugh.
You think about things, going down. How you could kick at the water and not hurt it. The way you know the water’s been around longer than you and is going to be laughing at you with the forever shore rocks long after you’ve washed away.
And then something swam up from out of the river’s depths; something long, like the sundown shadow of a dangling snake. For just a mouthful of time I thought it was my cock floating free from her teeth, but even on my best days I never hung that long. Over a yard, maybe more, hard to tell in the shadows of the water, murky, going down; hard to tell while my teeth were clenching holes into my lips, hard to tell while I was drowning. It looked like an eel, some impossibly long mutant stretch of lamprey eel.
Its mouth opened like a starving trumpet, a fanning of teeth, whirling like a fish-hide meat grinder, swimming down towards the head and my crotch, scenting the blood, the bracelet of blood, the chain of blood leading up between my legs.
I tried to kick, but the anchor and the long links of chain kept dragging me down. I grabb
ed the impossible eel around the neck to try and choke it out. Only the damn thing was all neck and slippery as well-oiled pasta. I screamed and took in more water, choked and bit my scream off hard.
I could feel it down there, through the teeth and the pain and the drowning, poking at the head, trying to get into it, up through the throat. I tried to kick at it again, but the thing was too close. It was like trying to kick my own shadow. It dodged and kept chewing upwards while the anchor pulled me down.
And then the bottom rushed up, a dozen feet or more of long, cool, sucking, slimy string-fingered mud, puckering me into a filthy body-hugging sack of unnamable sludge. The lamprey thing kept working like a funnel of fangs, pushing up through the blood-pipe of the severed head, chewing a meaty love tunnel up to my cock, taking it in, a hundred dozen chilly-nippled butterflies gutting and slitting up my meat.
It might have been eating me.
It might have been mating with me.
I just didn’t know.
So I screamed.
The water rushed into my scream like an invading army of horny-assed, empty-bellied barbarians charging through the wreckage of a sudden gutted breech in a nunnery wall.
And then I screamed again.
Fuck.
I ought to be drowned, but I’m not. The water tasted like a thick, warm, milkshake-eggnog chowder, clottish and somehow nourishing. I rooted through the muck, pawed at the cloying tangle of bottom dirt and decaying water weeds. Somehow I could see in this darkness. Like the river bottom was lit up with long black candles.
Below me, I could see the lamprey thing dangling from the stump of Hoover-girl’s hacked-off head, like a long quivering root. The rows of soft feathery gills fluttered open and closed like the purple-painted pipe caps of a drowned calliope, wringing oxygen from the slurry of industrially fouled river water; open, close, open, close, like carrion violets singing for rain, up along the lamprey’s scaly sides and into Hoover-girl’s hungry hollow cheeks.
I could breathe.
I could breathe through my dick.
I don’t know how this happened. Maybe it was something in the lamprey. Maybe it was something in the befouled river water. Maybe God was just in dire need of a good belly laugh.
I didn’t ask any more questions. I just wanted out of there. I wanted the bastards that did this to me. I kicked for the surface, but the anchor chain was too heavy.
Okay, so I’d walk.
Only the sludge wouldn’t let me. It was like trying to work my way through a state of permanent inertia. It pulled me back, dragged me in and under.
I had to get the goddamn anchor off my ankle. I bent over and pushed down, practicing lamprey yoga in the dirtiest river bottom in town. I’d probably laugh if I could see myself, but somehow I didn’t feel the least bit amused.
I caught hold of the shackle and wiggled it. It was wet. Maybe I could slide it off.
Shit.
There was a tooth in the metal where the hammer had hit it. It dug deep into the meat of my ankle. I couldn’t take this off without tearing my whole foot off.
So that’s what I did. I worked at it. I shimmied the manacle back and forth, working it like the tooth of a nine-hundred-pound glass-cutter. I felt the skin unravel, felt it part like some fucked-up Red Sea of meat, skin and tissue.
I worked it, inch by goddamn inch.
Finally I’d cut my way around. I pushed on the manacle and felt the skin work loose. It ought to be enough. If I could just skin my own foot, there ought to be enough play in the manacle to work it free.
If I could just skin my own foot.
It was funny, the things you found yourself thinking in the run of a day. I mean, I started out thinking about a breakfast of eggs and hash browns and greasy fat sausages, and now I was playing skin-the-tail-off-the-donkey with a giant, mutant space lamprey, trying to figure out how to flense my own foot.
Skinning yourself with a mangled leg iron is a little like uprooting crab grass. The suckerlets of flesh peeled away, one by one. I could feel each nerve ending stretch and snap as I worked the skin down over my ankle. It was like dragging off a long, slow, wet sock.
The pain was extreme, but compared to the lipsticked plumb bob I was wearing and the yard-and-a-half of mutated eel flesh that was hanging down from that, it was a walk through daisies and cream.
Finally, after a forever or so of submarine screaming, I was free.
I pulled and kicked and dragged myself up to the surface, humping along through the sludge water like a blind dragonfly larvae. It was kind of pleasant, compared to the rest of my night.
I emerged, like Venus in a fish-scaled Trojan. Blood streamed down my leg through Hoover-girl’s dead lips and along the lamprey’s sides.
I figured the lamprey carcass would slide off. Return to the depths from whence it sprang.
No such freaking luck.
The skin stayed stuck.
So I pulled myself onto the shore, and the lamprey was still hanging there, a long, cartilaginous party favor left streaming from the rafters. I could barely stand. I’d lost way too much blood from my foot and my cock and the pistol-whipping. I had to staunch this. I needed to cover myself up with something.
I looked down at my drinking buddy, the mutant-assed lamprey.
Why not?
I leaped to one of those tall conclusions usually reserved for the drunk, mad or incurably stupid.
I pulled the lamprey up, twisting it, in a painful contortionist maneuver, like a long, scaly body stocking, fitting a foot into each of its gills and pushing down, the teeth puckering and chewing like amphibious Velcro. I had to work it, tugging and dragging the lamprey up over my hips, then all at once it spontaneously sucked itself forward like a reluctant cocksucker.
I don’t know why I did it. It just seemed right is all.
Now I was covered, head to foot. It felt like I was wearing my very own uniform, a dark scabrous wetsuit. Spandex, slimy-scaled sharkskin Spandex long johns. The only sign of abnormality – if anyone dressed in a flexible, mutant parasitic eel could be called even remotely close to normal – was the cumbersome bulge of Hoover-girl’s head. It looked a little like I was shoplifting a basketball or maybe like I’d got carried away with my jockstrap.
It looked like I was growing the mother of all tumors, but at least I was covered and warm. Maybe the damned thing was eating me, but I was safe for now.
I could stand.
I could walk.
And I could hunt.
I stalked out of the river like a pint-sized Godzilla. It took me twenty minutes of slow, tortured, dry-land wading, but I found them in the parking lot of The Sloppy Second. They were celebrating with a case of cheap wine that they’d bought with the little bit of cash they’d found in my wallet. Having their own personal tailgate party in the back-end of a Buick.
I still didn’t know who they were and, truth was, I didn’t particularly care.
They could belong to any of a baker’s dozen of gangs I’ve pissed off. Or a crime lord that didn’t like the way I mooned his residence.
Hell, it might even have been my bookie.
I didn’t care. I was having one of those right here, right now, fuck-the-cholesterol-and-let’s-get-it-on kind of moments.
I caught hold of the first one and broke both of the taillights with his teeth. The second one took a swing at me, trying to break some ribs, but the lamprey armor worked better than an umpire’s best vest. I shoved him down and slammed the trunk door down against his head until his neck made a pretty snapping sound. The third one went for his gun. I let him get one shot off, just because I couldn’t get to him in time.
I had half a hide-bound heartbeat to wonder what was going to happen and then I found out that the lamprey was tougher than Kevlar, too.
So I caught hold of him, took the gun and tried to cram it in his ear.
It wouldn’t fit.
“Come here,” I said. “Give me a kiss.”
From inside the lamprey i
t probably sounded like, “Come in my ear and live in piss,” but he got the point. He got a whole mouthful of points.
I held his face against the lamprey’s stretched-out mouth, then I swizzled him down like a chunky meat-slushie. I felt the warmth of him working over my lampreyed-up skin. It felt kind of like a wetsuit full of warm fish chowder.
I might have heard Hoover-girl gulping down what was left of him, or maybe that was just my fish-addled imagination.
When it was over I just leaned against the Buick, wondering what to do next.
How the hell was I going to get out of this?
I stumbled towards The Sloppy Second.
Maybe they had a skinning knife, or at least a deboner.
And a large box of salt.
Now this was really going to hurt.
THE MEAT AXE OF LOVE
The woman stood in the kitchen, waiting for her family to leave. She dreamed of the freezer, sitting in the basement, open like a frozen wound. She was afraid to speak. She forced herself to think white noise thoughts.
If you need a name, call her honey or mom. Her original label had atrophied from casual disuse. Even she couldn’t remember it. She made breakfast, wondering just how many times she’d made breakfast for this family that called themselves hers. Every day, every year – how many times?
A thousand?
Ten thousand?
She really didn’t want to try to remember.
This wasn’t a morning for memories.
She wondered if she’d really emptied the freezer. She couldn’t remember that, either. Memory was a tricky art. It magnified and distorted itself, melting down like an ice cube in a disused glass.
Get to work.
She threw bacon into the cast iron frying pan she hated to wash. The bacon settled into the heated pan with a rattlesnake’s lisping sigh.
Yes.
There was nothing left for her to do but make the orange juice. She tipped the juice can upside down. It puckered from its tubular cardboard time capsule, then splashed and sank like a frozen depth charge into the water-filled plastic juice jug. Then she stabbed and stirred a faded wooden spoon into the jug’s gullet and watched the cryogenic vitamin C and semi-natural food coloring spin in a slow orange vortex.
Nothing to Lose Page 3
