Walking Wounded

by Robert Devereaux

  April had been easy. Kinda sloshed. Or maybe just a little lax in the head. He’d picked her up leaving a frat house alone, walked her across Laurel and between the tall trees and toward Lory Student Center and the dorms beyond. Trusting bitch. A little charm, a little sweet talk, easy flirting-like he’d practiced a thousand times in front of the mirror.

  She’d been swayable.

  He’d clomped her once at the beginning, soon as she’d climbed into his truck. Going dancing? Sure we are. She turned to lock her door at his request and Clomp! Then he didn’t want to, but he clomped her again when she resisted at the tree. He carried her from his truck. She tried to knee him on the way, then again when he pounded the stakes into the tree, unbound her hands, and attempted to tie the ropes to the stakes. She’d been fury and hellfire to deal with. Quiet sex-eyed April Downing had a fearsome will to live. So he’d clomped her a good one, propping her up and securing her hands. Her thin pale arms he stretched tight as a crossbar against the killing tree, which was thick as a century’s growth and took its time curving about.

  Wasn’t much moon but there was plenty of solitude, so if April decided to take to screaming, there’d be no cause for worrying about it but simply for celebrating the power of the human voice to thrill. Just like when the kids had held him down, kicking and screaming, and poured red Kool-Aid down his throat and into his nose and over his eyes, a choking then but they didn’t care-that sweet shit griming his face and the flies buzzing after him and that fake red odor in the air, pretend strawberry. April was wearing an orange frilly halter top and jeans and flats. Grazing his knuckles with tree bark, he reached around her to undo the three large buttons at her back. Then he needed the hedge clippers to scissor up her front and snip the two dangling halves from her shoulders. They fell apart. She was fuck awesome. April had the softest yum-miest whitest creamiest eye-achers he’d ever seen on an angel baby’s torso.

  He hoped society was proud. What was about to happen to this pretty bitch was all its fault. For years on end, he’d been good, though he’d had the urges and come close a few times. Then the fucking fed-erales had danced the Waco rat-a-tat-tat, all that cult shit urping up again, the Jim Jones tie-ins, week after week in the papers and on TV and it tore him up fierce. He’d manage somehow to get himself together enough to go in and simper at the eaters and take their orders and even clap his way through the jivey empty Happy Happy Birthday song for the yup folk and their kids. Same damn wipes that had forced Kool-Aid down his gizzard, only older. He’d never been Jimmy Jones; no, his mom much preferred just plain Jim, Jim the infant, Jim the toddler, Jim the gangly kid, Jim Jones in nineteen-seventy-fucking-eight when he was in seventh grade and the sporadic tweaks and torments suddenly found focus, day in day out. Hey if it ain’t wacko Jim Jones! Who brought the jug of Kool-Aid today and how shall we pounce and trounce our little four-eyed wacko freak? The bastardly ratfucks, Jenkin and Bart and Sarno, they were the ringleaders, the ones that barked orders to hold him down, the ones that slugged him when he squealed, that kicked him and poured that sweet sticky red shit all over his face, into his nose and mouth so he felt he’d drown in it, his neck and scalp dripping with it, the pitcher’s brutal lip knocking at his teeth. And the busty girl-fucks, the behind-handers who hid their laughs behind their cupped fingers, stood to one side, with their moundy pair of eye-achers harnessed up to torment the kickers and pourers and their tight little curvy butts hugged tight by their jeans, such a taunting swiveling packet of do-it-to-me in the face of his humiliation. They could’ve called a halt to it. The girl-fucks had that power. They could’ve said something, they could’ve purred some sympathy and had the pussycravers lay off; instead they’d held back and put a palm to their broad smiles and stood just so, so that no one could miss the little wiggle of their boobies-n-butts. He hadn’t missed it, not through his teary screaming, the choking and sputtering as the cold red liquid splashed in his face and trickled down his neck and drenched his shirt. The behind-handers chose to let his torment go on, day after day, watching, getting off on it, his first inkling of what they were truly about on this planet.

  And his mother, that fat jowly bitch who insisted her boy go to school come hell or high water, had been part of the whole charade. He hadn’t seen it then, but he’d known in his gut all along and it came clear over the years. He saw her fucking Toon-erville-Trolley body blundering about, coming at him again and again. You will go to school, you will go to school No wonder Dad had skedaddled. She was the powerhouse behind his torment, had been all along; and when finally that fat chowderhound croaked, all the hatred she’d spewed over him, all that squinty-eyed loathing that made his mom the

  linchpin of the behind-handers-every bit of it went out of her body into theirs, into the whole sad insidious race of them, with their boobies-n-butts, with their eye-achers, with their baby-holes, with their smiles covered up behind their hands while all the while they did their pretend stuff about being caring and kind.

  April, filthy-mouthed but redundant April, had strong horsey legs. When she revived and saw her state, she gave him a stinging wallop across his cheek with one knee. Her flats he’d removed and was caressing her feet when she did it. He scuttled back, felt his nose. No break, no blood. Just puffy warmth, trauma in the middle of his face. It’d recede. She was working up steam, spewing a limited store of venom, alternating wild kicks his way with pretty torso twists to test the ropes. They held, of course. Into the jeaned flurry of flesh he stepped, arm in tight around her butt to keep some control, close up to bridle and love the power of her thighs. Her nips were near. Jugs jiggled in resistance. Where his right hand bobbled to catch zipper, struggle it down, her womanheat lay. Slit-fuzz in service to new baby-birthings, let a fucker in, poot a fucker out, deceptively cute, would turn out inevitably to be a kicker or pourer or a grinning wiggling do-nothing cuntcubator.

  She’d be the one. They were all in cahoots, the girl gigglers. A secret network, planetwide. This April would help him tap into it, would screech his message into their conniving skulls with such force that they’d stop giggling and sober up and weld their thighs together forever. Born no more. Clear the pipeline. Let ’em age and dwindle and die, the earth purified at last.

  When he yanked the jeans and red-lace briefs down and away, she tried a volley of kicks. But he fended her bare legs off, feeling the power in them, her desperation going straight to her sole defense. He stepped back, out of leg range. He looked at her, saw her for what she was. There was still makeup on her face, but except for that, all her shopped deception was gone, her cover blown. Wan writhing slugflesh in the moonlight, curves and tucks and slit-fuzz to tempt cockrise and burrowing and seedshoot in those not as wary as he. The leaf cover below her feet made crackly sounds, twig and bark and overlapped interleavings rustled by her struggles. Beneath the truck tarp, he found mallet and ropes and twin stakes that had rattled like loose jack handles against iron. He sank one, barely out of range of her kicks, only tamped in a little but enough to know that it wouldn’t do. Then he got wise, pictured her legspread, added a foot more around the base of the tree, pounded the suckers in at an angle, like bigtop stakes. First he tied a length of rope to each one. Then he caught at an ankle, held it so that her left leg flailed ineffectually against the tree, so limited was her movement. He secured a tight knot about her ankle, snagged the other, did the same, her body pinned against the tree, butterfly on cardboard.

  He stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  Beautiful.

  If you ignored the girl’s head, with its unflattering spew of tears and vitriol, April was all come-on. But his dick was not duped. Securing her excited him, a dim head-glow only. He lifted a finger (One moment!) and went back to the truck. Under the tarp, lying on a gritty towel, he found the Makita cordless drill, hefted it. Green finish, a sixteenth of an inch drillbit tight in its chuck, tip to clutch just, over two inches long. Wasn’t much heft to it, other than the hidden weight of its motor, but as he moved towa
rd the naked spread-eagled woman, the drill hung heavy in his hand. It would be meaningless if he and his victim didn’t connect, if he didn’t stop shutting her out.

  April was his conduit to the whole sex, all of ’em.

  “Come on, please? Let me go.” Her eyes flitted away from the drill. Her voice was harsh and raw.

  “Look,” he said, feeling foolish, “it’s not personal. You just wound up in the wrong body is all.” She looked a little like a nude chanteuse, with her legs parted and her arms spread wide-and-out in a starburst of climactic song. Love me, it said, a sick Judy Garland gesture. And though he saw now that she was not in the slightest interested in sex, her torso could not help but radiate a steady message of fuck-me, no matter what: Saint Sebastian, arrows, pale flesh aerated in sensuous oils.

  “You’re a nice man.” April was lying, and it was not a pretty sight. It made him sad, her pouty lips passing a lie so glibly. “We can undo this,” she continued. “It’ll just be between me and you.” He watched a glimmer of hope die in her wide eyes as he made no reply.

  “You’re pretty,” he said at last.

  She looked away. “Ah.” She thought she knew what he meant. Stupid girl. But her nature dictated filth.

  “People like the white skin, of course. Some people, anyway. This,” he touched her, “or this, these things-no don’t struggle.”

  “I don’t like that.” Her voice had a girl’s whine in it, the sound of a victim. “Please don’t.”

  “But they really drool over the hidden bits, the bits where blood darkens it or swells it up. These nip things, for one,” he said, pulling one forward, taffy-stretch, and giving it a slight nose tweak. He held the drill up, took in the tip of the bit, then dropped it to his side and let April’s nipple worm away from his fingers. “But it’s this baby-thing that’s the real biggie.”

  “No!” Sudden tension at her inner thighs.

  He fingered the dry-lipped spread-open gash, the vile place where every damned planet-fuck dropped from.

  April was holding very still and the look in her eyes saddened him. She didn’t understand. Here it comes, that was what she was thinking, her face tense. Here comes his seeder. Still, she glanced at the drill, then away.

  “Baby-thing, red drool.” Emerging fuzzhead. Snipped slit to gush blood. He’d once suffered through a movie in school, watching gloved hands coax more damaged goods into the world where less, much less, was called for. Pinching her outer labia, not painfully, simply curious at the pink hidden idolized damned thing with its hooded clit, he said to her, “This has power, you know. This snail-thing could stop boys from kicking each other, if only you girls would learn how to use it. Disarming little pouch.” They would all shut up tight forever, assuming his attempt worked.

  “Okay, okay,” edging on tears but impressively brave. “You can teach me on the way back to town.”

  He idled a fingertip up through her private hair, her tummy taut and tympanic, stiff breastbone between her eye-achers, a smooth neck. Raising the drill, he rested it at an angle across his chest like a salute. Her face despite her tears was deeply beautiful-just how deep he was about to find out. A face from some filmbook came to him, Black Sunday, Barbara Steele, deep black bloodless pits, glaring woman-eyes, long black hair. Akin to what he’d plant upon April’s blond-tressed, fair-skinned face. But blood would well up here, well up and spill, from the teeny baby-holes he’d gently press into this unblemished canvas. The pocks he sank would drool blood downward, jagging to suggest the next new place to create one. Teeny tiny holes, miniature temptations being opened in her. They’d only birth blood, and maybe he’d push a pinkie into one of them, but nothing bigger, and sure as heck nothing with seeds in it.

  “Power to save put-upon boys, power to stop wars,” he said, as he stretched the cheek-skin flat under her left eye. “Convey that to your kind in the next hour.” She pretended not to know how to relay messages to her kin. “Don’t waste it on fear and hate, okay?” He raised the drill, quick trigger-test, then silent, pointing it, divining the perfect place between thumb and forefinger.

  “God please no.” She knew it was coming.

  “Hold still now.”

  The whine began, her skin accepted the hole as easily as wine-veined cheese; it was only when they hit bone that April really began to lose her composure.

  2

  LOVE SWEETENED, LOVE SOURED

  Ratt found Love Bunny at an outside table, spry wrens hopping about by the redwood screens. At this restaurant, The Rainbow, she’d enjoyed months of calm and refuge, just a short jaunt north of her new house, a perfect atmosphere for a season’s contemplation.

  But this morning, she felt restive.

  “You made it,” her husband’s lover said.

  “Five minutes by car, twenty at a brisk walk.” Round white table. Sherry wore a tight peach blouse. A thin strand of microbeads fell with coy abandon upon her bosom. Her skirt broke just above the knees, and her legs were smooth and curvy and tantalizing. Katt’s heart sank. This woman grew on you. Katt had felt a surprisingly mild interest in her at the BBS party, but that interest seemed to have grown since then. Moreover, Sherry’s whole manner today, the way she was dressed, the way she sat, touched a remembrance of Katt’s brief fling at Oberlin with a former roommate. She dragged out a white plastic chair draped in umbrella shade and sat.

  “Relax, it’s a beautiful day. Have an omelette.”

  Katt smiled. “Sorry.” She accepted a menu and half-heard their waitress recite the day’s special.

  Sherry said, “I liked our chat.” Her hand rested for an instant on Katt’s arm, then away.

  “Oh yes, it was lovely,” Katt said, her voice steeped in lust. Sherry mmmm’d in return. Their exchange had had an extra tinge to it; the anxiety of Marcus’s being in the study and quite possibly walking in on her while the steam rose from her PC-private erotica on parade-made her keep a finger by the Page Down key. But he didn’t disturb her. Most likely, stealing time from his new book on Massinger, he’d been composing one of his letters to Sherry, the kind he “hid” with the attrib command, the kind she unhid, when alone, easily with XTreeGold on a floppy, and read.

  The waitress returned, Katt ordered, and watched Love Bunny’s lips move as she ordered. Odd, how complex Katt’s emotions were. Those same lips had loved her mate not two days before, a quick tryst after class, prompting also one outrageous outpouring of prose in praise of them. And yet her anger toward the redhead seemed not at all to diminish her attraction to her; it was as if Love Bunny, pure mind, were indeed distinct from Sherry Feit, The Other Woman, an easy split between them. One began these silent, in-depth friendships on BBSs or via e-mail, and it was inevitably a surprise, and no surprise at all, when you finally met. A connection formed, a deep fancy of thought and desire.

  “What’d you tell your husband?” Eggs Benedict lay on her fork, held before the hint of a smirk.

  “That I’d follow my usual Sunday routine, The Rainbow and a walk to Old Town Square,” Katt said. “He’s…” She stopped herself from revealing anything. “He has some about-the-house sorts of things to do.”

  “It’s so easy to fool them.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The trusting ones, anyway.”

  “Yes.” A certain unflattering lack of compassion had its hold on Sherry, but Katt went with it. Her friend had had, after all, a mean-streaked sadist in her past whom it must have felt good to deceive. Marcus, by contrast, held a special place in her heart despite his betrayal, despite hers, despite the terrible nudge she’d given his potential Huntington’s disease six days before. She hadn’t dared to probe him since. But under her sunny exterior, she’d kept watch on him, attempting to detect aberration in movement, a falter of purpose, a hint of self-doubt. Maddening, her not knowing, not daring to ask; she’d carried on normally, insatiable curiosity furying within.

  Her shared space with Love Bunny soon became an oasis of calm. Katt relaxed into it, trading impres
sions of her job and Sherry’s, both of them keeping things vague-yes I teach at CSU (department omitted), I do software at HP (no need to narrow it, even though Marcus had said very little about his family in the time Katt had monitored him).

  Over hazelnut coffee and cheesecake, there in the sun of a beautiful day, Sherry said, “Would you feel all right about using first names?”

  It came out casual, just before a two-handed sip, her lips at the rim; but it felt crucial. In the messages she had spied upon, Marcus had always called her “my mate,” he so hated the word “wife”-but never had he named her. Still there was no way of knowing if he’d let it slip during his four months in Iowa. Katherine? Katt? If he’d mentioned it at all, it had been the latter.

  She thought of offering Katherine, a more common name and more likely to be written off as coincidence. But she could not lie to this woman, her electronic friend and her soon-to-be fleshly lover. And Katherine, a name nobody at all had ever used on her, not even angrily toward her as a child, would be a lie. “Mine’s Katt,” she said, detecting no spike of panic across the table.

  She breathed freer.

  “Sherry,” said Sherry, “but no fair combing through a university directory for more.”

  She agreed not to. It was a trivial thing, this name exchange, but some sort of watershed had passed. Although Katt still held back a major secret from Sherry, their BBS masks had been compromised. “I like your name,” Katt told her, meaning it.

  “So did you walk or drive?”

  “Walked.” Perhaps not the wisest idea given the news reports about the coed discovered Thursday on the banks of the Poudre, her body mutilated in ways only hinted at.

  “Maybe you’d accept a ride. I’d drop you wherever.”

  Nice game. Sherry was smiling. Katt said, “Sure.”

  “And maybe… you’d like to see my place first?”

  Butterflies within. All those messages exchanged, an uninhibited expression of pure psychic fantasy, lusts safe behind anonymity. Then they’d met. Katt had come to know her, observed her in a casual orgy, a rich mix of emotions drifting in from this woman, nexus ever on her mind. “Why not?” tossed off with a look across the table nowhere near as casual.