Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  No commitments. No complications. No consequences.

  And heterosexual men aren't the only ones who've benefitted from this revolutionary technology that promises to fulfill all of our sexual fantasies. Less than a year after Dream Girls hit the market, a masculine equivalent was launched for women called Dream Boys. While initial response was positive and customers flocked to the stores, Dream Boys never really gained the same popularity as their female counterparts.

  The problem lies in the fact that men are much more aroused by visual sexual stimulation, while women get turned on more by verbal cues and loving gestures. There's a reason why there are dozens of pornographic magazines geared for men while there's less than a handful available for women. And why women read so many romance novels.

  That's the biggest reason for the relative failure of Dream Boys: women want more of an emotional connection with their lover. That turns them on more than a great ass or a sculpted chest or six-pack abs. And while Dream Boys are good at nodding and listening and providing multiple orgasms, they're about as emotionally engaging as a vibrator.

  So for most women, it just became an expensive sex doll. Another toy to use when they were lonely. However, Dream Boys have maintained their popularity with gay men and Catholic priests. After all, whether you're gay, straight, or Catholic, if you're a man and there's a naked body in the vicinity to your liking, chances are you're sporting wood.

  Just ask JFK, who was both straight and Catholic.

  A few years after the Marilyn fiasco, the government tried again with Jayne Mansfield, but that didn't work out any better, so they scrapped the project and put it on hold until a northern California biotech company called Synergystix bought the technology from the government in the middle of the twenty-first century. Synergystix had to tinker with the technology for nearly a decade before they produced a salable product, but once human cloning got past the initial government hurdles, Dream Girls was good to go.

  Understandably, Dream Girls have had their share of problems, not the least of which included men who used their Dream Girls to impersonate an ex-wife or a mother-in-law in order to perpetrate a crime or play an elaborate practical joke. It also wasn't uncommon to see men walking around arm in arm with celebrities or somebody else's wife, which obviously led to some problems.

  A few years ago, a guy I worked with met me at a bar with his newly acquired Dream Girl, which had morphed into the twenty-five-year-old wife of another co-worker. I couldn't tell the difference and neither could anyone else. You can imagine what happened when the wife's husband showed up.

  The dilemma was solved by packaging the Dream Girl with a base unit that has to be plugged into a power source, limiting the Dream Girl's range – kind of like the old cordless phones. If the Dream Girl travels more than a hundred feet or so from the base unit, she'll return to the bald, breastless creature found in the display container at Brookstone or Sharper Image. Of course, if the power goes out, the same transformation occurs, which could pose a problem if you're having sex at the time. To account for this, the base unit comes with a battery back-up of thirty minutes, which is more than enough time to finish taking care of business. Especially when you consider that the average male achieves orgasm in three to five minutes.

  At some point, all of the hype and hysteria and legal and political hand-wringing will come to an end and everyone will just get on with their lives – some of us better than others. I'll be the first to admit that the technology still has a few kinks that need to be worked out, but all in all, I think the future of heterosexual relationships is Dream Girls.

  In addition to the obvious benefits of having a partner who not only doesn't mind that you have sex with other women but willingly fulfills those fantasies for you, there are numerous reasons why Dream Girls are superior to human women.

  They don't have to be romanced. They don't want a commitment or a two-karat diamond ring. They don't talk about their problems. They don't argue. They don't complain about how much you drink or how much you smoke or how much time you spend with your friends. They don't expect you to stop reading the sports page when they're talking. They don't care if you come first. They don't get pregnant. They don't have menstrual cycles or mood swings. They don't contract venereal diseases or AIDS. They don't age. They don't get sick.

  And they don't die.

  I discovered this last unexpected benefit when the 169th Miss America was out back cleaning the second story gutters of my home in a French-cut lace bikini. I didn't see what happened and there weren't any neighbors around to witness the accident, but apparently the extension ladder shifted or she somehow lost her balance and fell, impaling herself on a decorative wrought iron fence post in the back yard. By the time I reached her, she'd stopped breathing and had lost a good deal of blood.

  Angry and disappointed, thinking only of the extended warranty I'd declined to purchase, I lifted my Dream Girl off the post and laid her on the grass. As I stood grieving over the loss of my most prized possession, the wound below her breasts began to heal, closing up and fading away in less than a few minutes. When Miss America opened her eyes and smiled up at me, stretching out on the lawn like a cat that had just awakened from an afternoon nap, I realized her alien DNA had additional benefits besides the morphing feature.

  Upon further inspection, I couldn't detect any sign of the wound or any indication of long-term damage. Had she sustained a serious head injury, I have no doubt that her CPU would have been damaged beyond repair, rendering her technically dead. But barring a blow to her head, I wondered if she could survive other accidents.

  I wondered if she had more than nine lives.

  A few days later, while I was having sex with an ex-girlfriend who dumped me for a woman, I smothered her with a pillow. She fought against me at first, her arms and legs thrashing, but soon her struggles tapered off and she stopped moving. Five minutes after I removed the pillow, she was in the kitchen making me a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Since then, I've killed my Dream Girl thirty-seven times and in nearly as many fashions – she's been beaten, whipped, stabbed, hung, strangled, burned, bled, eviscerated, and even dismembered. The limbs take nearly an hour to grow back but she's always as good as new. My method of choice, however, is using a pillow to suffocate her while we're having sex. It's less messy and more intimate.

  When I was ten years old and on the cusp of puberty, I discovered masturbation and thought it was the best thing in the world. I also thought I'd truly discovered it and wondered if anyone else knew about the joys of sexual self-gratification. This is like that, only it goes beyond the intensity of raging hormones. It's more primal, a thirst or hunger I didn't know existed but which I can't seem to satisfy. I spend more time killing my Dream Girl now than having sex with her.

  I climb out of the hammock and follow the Starbucks girl into my house, where I find her in the kitchen, bending over into the open refrigerator to grab another Corona. She turns to look at me, her nipples hard, her eyes inviting, but I have other plans.

  After she uncaps the Corona and inserts a lime, I ask her to get me a hand saw and a six-foot length of nylon cord. She hands me the bottle with a smile, then walks away, morphing back into my ex-wife on her way to the tool shed.

  I've been reading in the papers about an increase in violent crimes against women and I wonder if other Dream Girl owners have discovered the Holy Grail of carnal pleasure. I don't know why they would want to risk killing real women, though. After all, since Dream Girls aren't human, I can kill as many women as I want and not have to worry about getting arrested or having my soul burn in hell. It's the perfect situation.

  No commitments. No complications. No consequences.

  «-ô-»

  Lower Slaughter

  By S. G. Browne

  "Oooh, look Frank," Sandy said, pointing out the window of the bus toward the stone c
ottage nestled at the base of a rolling green hill. "Isn't that charming?"

  "Hmmm. Very charming," Frank said, though he would have preferred the view beneath a blue sky rather than the gray clouds that had been threatening rain most of the day.

  Why they couldn't have taken their vacation someplace warmer escaped him. Maui would have been nice. Even Mazatlan would have been preferable to the gray, drizzly, cold English weather. Take away the roundabouts and the endless charming stone cottages and they might as well have stayed in Seattle.

  "I'd like to live in a house like that," Sandy said, looking back at the cottage like a kid trying to catch one last glimpse of Disneyland. "I'd like to move here when we retire and live in a house like that."

  Frank grunted. He had no desire to move to England, to retire in the Cotswolds and spend the rest of his life in some charming little country village with a name like Stow-On-The-Wold or Moreton-In-Marsh or any place with a name that had to be hyphenated. After less than three days touring the Cotswolds, Frank was already catching a case of boredom. Small English country towns were like cheap beer – once you've been through five or six, you can't tell the difference anymore.

  As the bus entered the outskirts of Bourton-On-The-Water – the quintessential Cotswold village with stone houses, friendly people, and a duck-filled stream that meandered through the center of town – the clouds finally made good on their threat.

  "Oh look, Frank," Sandy said, as if the raindrops were coins of gold. "It's started to rain."

  Frank glanced around at the dozen or so other passengers on the bus, most of who appeared to be locals on their way back home, not stupid tourists who couldn't see a late spring rain coming. He wished they could have spent their last day relaxing at the B&B in Cheltenham, but Sandy had wanted to take one more adventure before they left England. She made a habit of running last minute errands, barely catching airplane flights, and generally pushing her luck right up to the last second. Somehow she always managed to beat the clock, but Frank knew, sooner or later, she'd run herself right out of time.

  The rain began to run down the windows as the bus pulled into town and stopped across from a combination pharmacy and gift shop. The doors of the bus opened and several people stood up to get off.

  Sandy nudged Frank. "Let's get out and walk around."

  "In this?" Frank asked.

  "Oh come on," Sandy said. "It'll be fun."

  Frank had dozens of definitions of what he considered fun and this wasn't one of them.

  "We didn't bring an umbrella," Frank said.

  "We'll buy one."

  Frank glanced at his watch. "It's after two already. The ride back is a good forty-five minutes, and we still have to pack and eat dinner."

  "We'll eat here," Sandy said. "And we can pack tonight after we get back."

  Frank looked into his bag of excuses and found it nearly empty, save for some standard, practical rebuttals that had ceased to work years ago.

  "Come on," Sandy said. "I don't want to spend our last few hours of light sitting in our room just because of a little rain."

  The remaining passengers on the bus all seemed to be waiting for Frank to respond. Even the bus driver watched from the rearview mirror, one hand resting on the door's control lever.

  "All right," he said, standing up and throwing his hands in the air. If he'd had a white flag, he would have waved it.

  Sandy grabbed Frank's head in both hands, kissing him on the lips. "Thank you," she said, before walking past him toward the front of the bus.

  Frank followed her, pausing when he reached the door. Through a cascade of rain, Sandy stood beneath an awning in front of a store that sold scarves and sweaters and other apparel. Frank wondered if they sold umbrellas and rain slickers, maybe even a leash for his wife.

  Frank turned to the driver. "When's the last bus leave for Cheltenham?"

  "The last bus departs promptly at 5:23 p.m.," the driver said. "Don't be a minute late or you'll miss her."

  Frank checked his watch again. "We'll be early," he said.

  "That's good thinking," the driver said as Frank stepped off the bus into the rain. "Time has a habit of slipping away out here. And the nights fall faster than you'd think."

  Frank turned to ask the driver what he meant, but the doors closed and the bus pulled away, roaring off down the street before disappearing around a curve.

  "Frank! Frank, look!"

  Frank turned to find his wife pointing up to the sky, where the gray clouds had parted, revealing a large expanse of blue. The rain had stopped.

  Sandy turned to Frank, her smile radiant with the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old girl. "It's clearing up."

  Frank watched the large patch of blue spread out across the sky directly above them, pushing the gray out to the edges of town. One minute the rain was falling in buckets and the next minute, God punched a blue hole in the clouds. The only thing more unpredictable than English weather was his American wife.

  "Come on, Mr. Worry Wart," Sandy said, guiding him down the street past the shops. "Let's go exploring."

  * * * * *

  For the rest of the afternoon Sandy towed Frank around the village – patronizing every shop, checking the menus at every café, taking every path and alley past every home and garden until they'd seemingly covered Bourton-On-The-Water three times over. The rain had not returned, and with the sun shining and his wife running out of nooks and crannies to explore, Frank was beginning to think he might finally get a chance to park his butt at a table and enjoy a leisurely pint of ale when Sandy found one last unexplored path.

  "Look Frank," she said.

  A dirt path leading away from the sidewalk cut through a field of yellow heather. At the head of the path stood a wooden sign:

  Lower Slaughter 1

  Frank pulled out the Frommer's England travel guide and flipped through it, looking for a description of Lower Slaughter, but he couldn't find the name listed among the other Cotswold villages.

  "It's not in the book," Frank said.

  Sandy walked past the sign and started up the path.

  "Where are you going?" Frank asked.

  "To Lower Slaughter," she said, stopping and looking back. "It's only a mile. We'll be there in twenty minutes."

  Frank closed the travel guide and checked his watch. 3:47. A little over an hour-and-a-half until the last bus left. "I think we ought to stick around," he said. "I don't want to miss the bus."

  "We won't miss the bus, Mr. Stick-in-the-Mud," Sandy said, hands on her hips. "This is our last day in England and I don't want to miss a thing. Now come on."

  He stood next to the sign, watching in distress as his wife turned and marched down the path, then glanced once more at his watch. Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back, no more than ten minutes for Sandy to explore whatever existed of Lower Slaughter, which couldn't be much to look at if it wasn't listed in the Frommer's. Frank just hoped it had a pub.

  After letting out a sigh heavy with reluctance, Frank stuffed the travel guide into his jacket pocket and started down the path after his wife.

  The path was narrow, no more than three feet wide, and on either side the heather waved back and forth, the yellow, bell-shaped flowers brushing against Frank's jacket. One of the stems snagged his sleeve, tearing loose from the earth. Frank pulled the stem off and tossed it away, wiping his hand against his pants as nectar secreted from the flowers on to his skin. For several seconds his hand felt numb, then the feeling passed.

  Frank stared at his hand, checking for a rash or some sort of reaction, but other than a slight tingling there appeared to be no lasting effects. He glanced out across the field of heather, swaying back and forth in the breeze, and thought about the tentacles of a sea anemone waving in the ocean current, waiti
ng for an unsuspecting fish to wander into its bright, inviting, deadly grasp.

  He let out a nervous little laugh, one he didn't care for at all, then shook his head and chided himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. He laughed again, more relaxed this time, and continued along the path, making a point to stay clear of the heather as he hurried to catch up with his wife.

  The heather soon gave way to a field of tall grass bordered on one side by a small stream that appeared out of nowhere and curved past the grass before it cut through a grove of birch trees. In late May the birches should have been laden with fresh, green foliage. Instead, they had the stark, ghostly appearance of winter. Even the air seemed to have grown colder. Frank shoved his hands into his pockets and grumbled about the erratic English weather.

  "Isn't this beautiful?" Sandy asked.

  Haunted is more like it, Frank thought.

  As if to confirm this, the late afternoon sun vanished behind a wall of gray clouds, casting the landscape in a cold, colorless prelude to dusk.

  Up ahead, on the other side of the stream, Frank noticed several strange plants standing over three feet tall and growing on thick, thorny stalks that looked like medieval weapons. Along each stalk grew a dozen or more dual-lobed leaves, the edges of which were lined with sharp spines, while the insides of the leaves were colored a dark crimson. The plants looked like the Venus Flytrap he'd had as a kid, though Frank had never seen any in the wild and he'd never seen any this size. He used to feed his plant flies, tadpoles, and small pieces of ground beef. The plants near the stream looked big enough to consume a small animal.