by Lee, Edward
Taggert charged him, as he’d done in the past, when he’d tried to shake his balance by attacking a fortress’ foundations rather than the tops of towers. But this time, he slowed as he came near, barely grazed the man, instead turning, circling as the beast turned around. He went around once, barley eluding the giant’s grasp, leaned his shoulder into the back of the man’s knee.
They both went down, but his opponent wasn’t used to toppling over. His conquerors usually took him out with strikes to the eyes, the throat, but Taggert had rarely been quick enough to be effective.
The beast rolled, recovering faster than he’d hoped, but slow enough for him lock a tight hold of his neck. The beast sank fingers into his arms, smashed him back into Painfreak’s maze wall, cracking stone, but Taggert held on, pressed tighter, until he slipped under the last of challenger’s chin and jaw trying to hold him off.
The beast recovered far more quickly than Taggert did, and for a moment he thought the man would take advantage and finish him. But the man only cocked his head to the side, as if taking a last, long look, and walked away.
He’d have many more chances at the Queen. As Taggert stood, body aching, the maze spinning around his head, he understood there wouldn’t be a next time to prove himself and all that he was worthy of his species.
He found her in the center of the maze, a wide circle large enough to host a couple of tennis courts. Light filtered down from rough-hewn vents above them. Naked, she stood her ground like a challenger to, not a recipient of his gifts. Her hair stood like a black halo around her wide face, and her eyes were narrowed, as if she were studying a slab of meat for spoilage.
Her children were hidden away in the maze, waiting for a new brother or sister to be conceived.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Are you asking for permission?” she asked.
He moved forward.
“Do you ever wonder what happens to the Queens you tried to fuck?” she asked.
He hesitated before taking another step. “No,” he said.
“Their children eat them.”
He stopped, checked the other entries to the circle. “They haven’t eaten you.”
“Not yet.”
Another test, he wondered. Or foreplay. The traditions didn’t speak of what happened after a victor won his Queen, other than the obvious.
“Why doesn’t she eat them?”
“Oh, she does. At least, the ones who don’t run away quick enough.”
“Good for them.”
“It happens sometimes with the girls who don’t become Queens, the strong ones who stay in the tribe to make strong sons and don’t go off to gather a following of their own kind. Their children eat them.”
The men didn’t talk of those kinds of things, but he’d heard the stories. Mothers often died young. His mother and sister both did.
“Did you eat your mother? The ones who reach the Queen, they sometimes have.”
“No.”
“Did she eat your brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“Good for you.”
“We don’t talk about these kinds of things,” he said.
“Mothers talk.” She bowed her head. “Sometimes, we talk about what happens to fathers, too. Especially the ones who sire Queens with their wives, and then come after them in the Rut.”
“Did you eat your father?” he asked.
She smiled, to show the sharpness of her teeth.
Motion called his attention to the clearing’s periphery. Too late, he heard something behind him even as he stared into darkened entries behind the Queen and to his left.
He was flying through the air before he registered the impact. He was face down on the hard rock before pain fired up and down his back. His face smashed once, twice against the floor as a weight crushed his back and pushed the air from his lungs. He gasped, flailed, until he couldn’t move, anymore. Until blackness spilled into the center of the maze and clouded over the lighting and walls and the dusty floor, and his gasps for breath sounded like rocks tumbling over him in an avalanche.
He thought it odd that his own scent, one he usually ignored, was so strong, in this moment of helplessness. He croaked, from convulsing guts to burning lungs to raging throat, and even as he knew that was the last sound he’d ever hear the mystery of his scent nagged him, tugged at his consciousness, made him fight for one more moment in the world.
At last the weight lifted. He rolled over, air filling lungs now, rushing, pumping through heart and blood, illuminating the world again, grounding him back among the living.
His scent, but not quite.
He faced the Queen. Her eyes were on his conqueror, a slim figure, in black, hair gathered into a pony tail, the young buck he’d seen slipping away as he’d entered Painfreak.
That familiar scent.
“Don’t call my name,” his son said. The boy didn’t bother looking back.
Why would he, Taggert thought. The Queen’s eyes were on him, and nothing else.
Coughing, still trying to regain his voice, Taggert stumbled through the questions he wanted to ask—why hadn’t the boy manifested before? Had he been hiding, from his own kind, from his own family, all this time? With no teachings, no support, who could have sponsored his invitation into Painfreak and the Rut?
Too complicated, the questions choked him. He managed to whisper, “Why are you here?”
To his surprise, his son heard him. “For the Queen.”
“Why?” Taggert asked, the word containing all of his questions, even the ones he couldn’t yet put into words.
“Because I have something to give to our kind.”
“You never said anything.”
“That is my gift.”
The Queen spread her arms wide. The boy stepped to her. They embraced. She ripped his clothes from him as he tried to hold her, to force his kisses on her. But she writhed and slipped and tore away cloth until he was naked, and bleeding from her markings.
A few young bucks appeared at the entrances to the maze’s center. Behind them stood some of the Queen’s children, monsters, and a scattering of young boys and girls, some old enough to have come from the previous Queen.
They were witnesses to a change. Honoring the birth of new ways, the start of another tradition.
Taggert drew himself up into a kneeling position. He recognized two of the bucks from the tribe, participants and losers in the Rut. Friends of his son. Conspirators, against the tribe’s old ways, against their fathers and mothers.
More than once, he’d asked his son why he couldn’t be like his friends, and every time, his son had answered, “I can’t be like the rest of you. It’s not in me.”
He’d thought his son only human, but now, he saw his son as the next of their kind.
The Queen fell back as his son threw her to the ground, and she seemed to surrender as he jumped on top of her, penetrated her with a cock that seemed more stone than flesh, bit her on the neck as if to force her into submission.
The Queen’s children remained still.
They thrashed and the boy pumped eagerly, even as the Queen raised her hips in rhythm to all that he had to give.
And then, in a moment, she was on top, still taking what he had to give, arching her back, fingers interlocked with his, gazing into the light from above, into Painfreak’s soul, her mouth open as if to scream, but never screaming, never uttering a sound, only breathing, only fucking, in and out, in and out, taking seed into her womb, taking pleasure from the annihilation of an old way and the birth of a new path. A better path.
Through envy and jealousy, through the rage born in betrayal and the terror of bearing witness to change, Taggert saw that it was him, and all the rest of the Rut’s participants, who had lost their membership in the tribe.
His son was the future. His child with the Queen would be what their kind was evolving to become.
They’d all come a long way from the monsters released from Painfreak’
s depths. They’d traveled far in humanity’s shadow.
His son, without Taggert or anyone else in the tribe realizing, except for some few other young bucks not yet ready to be what they’d been born to be, was the next step in their kind’s journey.
The enormity of the change stunned Taggert. When the Queen at last looked down on his son, bared her teeth, and devoured him, first his hands, then his arms, then his cock and balls and finally back up to his throat, his face, and finally, after ripping open his chest, his heart, Taggert felt nothing. Not the horror of the flesh of his flesh being devoured, not the joy watching his conqueror fail to survive the Queen’s passions.
He felt alone, as if at a crossroads, abandoned, all roads closed to him, like a sacrifice tied to a post waiting to be consumed.
The Queen stood. Her children, both monsters and near human, entered the space and finished his son’s remains. The young bucks, some bruised and cut from their defeats, quickly followed. Careful not to interfere with the Queen’s children, they dipped their hands in his son’s blood and painted their faces in their hurried retreat.
A new tradition, fresh from the womb.
A gift. His son’s gift.
The Queen looked to him, this time. Her gaze locked with his. For that instant, under her attention, he mattered. He’d helped make something of value to the tribe, to the future of their kind.
He wished his wife was still alive. He wished he hadn’t killed and eaten her, as his kind sometimes did when a human wife or husband had no further use in fulfilling the tribe’s destiny. She would have been revolted by her son, but maybe in some human, perhaps human woman’s way Taggert could not imagine, she might also have been proud.
As he was proud, at last, and satisfied, even if he’d been beaten, even if the Queen had taken another man’s seed.
Because a part of him was his son, and somehow, through the union with a fully human woman, Taggert was a part of that son who’d beaten him and the tribe and everything that his kind was, in that moment, to prove himself worthy to cut a new way, a better way, through the world.
His son was the next step in their evolution, more than human, more than monsters.
Taggert wished he could stay, to see what the Queen would give birth to, to help her and her children raise the future.
The Queen appeared before him, arms at her sides. “Do you want to follow your son?”
The honor of her attention, the choice she gave him, robbed him of words for a moment. In that moment, he understood there was no place for him at her side, now, or in the future. Now was the time for the sacrifice at the crossroads to be consumed.
“Yes,” he said, tears welling in his eyes, not in sorrow, but in joy.
“Your seed is great,” she said. “I thank you and your line of mothers and fathers. It’s not often father and son both find a Queen. And a son never overtakes a father. I’m sure what comes from me won’t let me eat it.” She laughed at his expression.
Taggert wiped his face, not sure what he’d felt, or what she’d seen.
“I promise to raise the child for as long as I can, and teach the others to care for it when I’m gone. I hope, like you, the child grows to make more of its kind. I hope, like you, that we’ve truly taken another step away from this place.”
She looked up at the ceiling, and whispered, “Though we will never walk so far away from you, Mother, as to forget what you are to us.”
The Queen looked back to him, helped him to stand. He took in his arms, and she yielded to him, as she’d done with his son, as he’d always dreamed she’d do. He kissed her, on her bloody lips, tasting his son’s flesh in her mouth, and squeezed her. His cock rose and stiffened, her hands guided him into her. And before he realized it, she was kissing him, on the neck, face, lips, eyes.
He didn’t feel the fall to the ground, didn’t see how she climbed on top of him, pinned him to the hard, unyielding earth. He’d slipped out of her, she’d only been teasing him. She didn’t want his seed. She’d taken everything she’d wanted from him, already.
But he had her touch, and her eyes filling his vision, and the sharpness of her teeth in his flesh.
Pain made him close his eyes. She pulled away, let him see her for the last time.
“We eat more than our children,” she whispered to him. “We eat our husbands, our wives, our suitors. We eat the worthy and unworthy. But what glory will rise from what survives.”
He kept his eyes open as she took him, piece by piece, for as long as he could, even when the children returned to feed on him as they’d done with his son, as if it was his seed in the Queen, his life that had given him a future.
And before Taggert closed his eyes for the last time, he saw again the hanging cages he’d passed, the bars like teeth holding in their prisoners and all of their poisoned words and doomed lives, and he felt a wisp of freedom pass through him, as if his cage had been opened, as if he was an ancestor, an ancient monster released from Painfreak facing the light and open spaces of an eternal future instead of the darkness of an eternal end.
As if he’d arrived at last and forever in his most secret and treasured dreams.
| — | — |
Coping Mechanism
————
Jeff Strand
“Hey, how’s it going?” said Brett, shaking the small Asian man’s hand.
“It’s going quite well. Do you have the mark?”
Brett shot him his most winning grin. “Mark? You mean like a 666 on my scalp?”
“No,” said the Asian man. “That is not what I mean.”
“I was just kidding.”
“I’m sure that you were.”
“Nah, man, I don’t have a mark. She does, though,” he said, gesturing to Denise. “Look at all of those sweet tats. Show him the one on your arm, babe. Check that out. It’s a unicorn with two horns. Is that subversive or what?”
“It’s very artistic.”
Brett nodded politely to the much larger doorman who stood there, arms folded, unsmiling. “I’m sure we can work something out.” He shook the Asian man’s hand again.
The bill dropped to the ground.
“The mark or a referral,” said the Asian man. “Those are your only options.”
Brett bent down and grabbed the bill before it blew away. It was a hundred bucks! What was wrong with the guy? Brett was young, handsome, dressed for success, and he had a hot chick with him. He could get into any other club he wanted. This was bullshit.
He decided not to rush straight to the “This is bullshit!” argument. Better to try to reason with them first. “I just wanted you gentlemen to be able to go out and buy yourselves something nice. I’ve got a referral. Mike sent me.”
“I know no Mike.”
“What are you talking about? Everybody knows a Mike.”
“Sir, we are extremely busy. If you don’t meet the criteria, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“What do you mean, you’re busy?” asked Brett. “There’s nobody else around. It was impossible to find this place. C’mon, what’s the big deal?” He put his arm around Denise. “My friend is dying to check out Painfreak. We’re not a couple of degenerates. You can’t tell me you don’t want to see her in action.”
The doorman, still frowning, stepped forward in an intimidating manner.
“Okay, okay, fine, whatever. How do I get a mark?”
“I can’t help you.”
“This is bullshit.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Brett’s face was burning. These assholes were making him look like an idiot in front of the lady. He didn’t care if Denise liked him, but he didn’t want her to see him being disrespected.
“We’ll be back,” he said.
“And if you have a mark or a referral, you will be more than welcome to pass through the door,” said the Asian man.
Brett took Denise’s hand and stormed away. “You said it wouldn’t be a problem,” she said
, as they walked through the alley.
“Well, obviously, I was wrong. I didn’t know they were gonna be stuck-up jerks. I slipped the guy a Benjamin! Who turns down a Benjamin? That’s messed up.”
“I don’t think white guys get to call them Benjamins. Maybe we could try someplace else.”
Brett shook his head. “Hell no. I’ve heard the stories. The stuff that goes on in there is mind-blowing. Kinky, freaky shit you can’t get anyplace else. I’m not missing out on that. No way.”
Denise was silent for a moment. “How about this? Same fee, plus you cover a hotel room. You can do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t leave marks.”
“At Painfreak I could leave marks. That’s the whole point.”
“Well, you can’t get into Painfreak right now, and I can’t wait around all night for it to happen. I was offering you another option instead of going home and tugging it yourself.”
Brett glared at her. “I’ve got plenty of options before I’m reduced to whacking off. Plenty.”
Denise shrugged. “That’s cool. But I’ll need the money now. I’m not going to hang out with you all night unless I know for sure I’m getting paid.”
“Then fuck off. I don’t need you. I only hired you because I figured they’d let me in if I brought a hot chick, but apparently, you weren’t hot enough.” He took out his wallet and removed a twenty. “Here. For your trouble.”
She plucked the bill out of his fingers. “You’re a dick.”
Brett immediately regretted sending her away as he watched her walk off in her tight skirt, but he definitely wasn’t going to call her back over and apologize. Sure, an hour with her would be a hell of a lot better than going home to Maggie, but he still had his heart set on Painfreak.
He had no idea how to get a mark or a referral. The guy who’d told him about the club was on the other side of the country in Portland. He hadn’t said a damn thing about any mark, just that it was hard to get in. Brett didn’t even know the guy’s name.