The Skunge

by Barr, Jeff

  A chime sounded, signaling that HARDC71 had begun a private session show. All the other users dropped out of chat, leaving only her and him.

  "Hey baby," she said, patting her hair into place. Normally he asked for pigtails, but she hoped he wouldn't today—she had a headache already. There was a click as his mic came on line, and a second later the soft chime as his cam opened. He liked for her to watch him while he watched her. His miniature image resolved at the bottom right corner of her chat software.

  There was a kind of choreography to private shows, at least with her regulars. Some guys, they started the private and called you bitch or whore as soon as it started, no hello or anything, and they expected her to be naked and moaning within thirty seconds. If not sooner. HARDC was more civilized than that, but only by a thin margin. She had the idea that he liked to play the big man with a lot of models.

  Soon enough, the small talk was done and HARDC71—real name Colin, who had an ex-wife, two kids, and a raging fetish for schoolgirl porn—had his pants down, jerking his substandard cock while Sugar cooed and pouted and touched herself. He loved that she could come on command—his command, naturally. She'd never actually orgasmed on cam, nor was she aware of any cam-girls that had. She played it just like in her movies, everything for the camera.

  HARDC71 moaned her name and started to play with his balls, a sure sign he was on the approach and ready for liftoff. She moved her face closer to the camera, whispering to him, taunting him.

  "You gonna come on my face, baby? Gonna come all over my schoolgirl face, watch me lick it up—" She stopped talking when she realized he had stopped jerking off, and was now leaning into his own monitor, peering at her with his mouth open. There was something like disgust in his eyes.

  "T, honey?" he said. His cock, wilting from inattention, fell from his hand, and his face filled the screen. He adjusted his glasses and squinted. "Are you feeling OK?"

  "What do you mean, honey?" She tilted her head at him in a way she knew he found endearing, and surreptitiously checked her face in her spare monitor.

  A long, twisted black string hung out of the corner her eye. It poked out of her tear duct, and as she watched, it wriggled like a worm, tickling her cheek. She cried out and stumbled back from her computer, tripping over her guitar, sending it flying with a musical crash. She tumbled and hit the back of her head on the floor. Bright, flashing lights sparkled at the corners of her vision.

  She jumped to her feet and ran for the bathroom.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "You like rough trade?" Christian shouted over the music. The little balding guy adjusted his old-school horn rim glasses and licked his lips, eyeing Christian's chain belt and tight leather pants. Booming house beats pounded the air, while swirling gel-filtered lights flashed through the mind-numbing throb of the club. Strobe lights captured stuttering images of sweaty, naked flesh. Two hundred half-naked men, grinding and dry-humping on a dented steel dance floor the size of a large living-room. The smell of hot oil, sweat, and sex covered everything. Jacked-up pheromones baked off the twinks, twunks, bears and circuit boys, all of them working it on the floor.

  The little guy nodded like his head was on a spring.

  Christian leaned over to shout directly into his ear. "You like what you see?" The club turned the sound-system all the way up on the weekends, and Saturday night was the loudest and wildest. Christian ran one hand along his oiled abs, letting the pulsing lights of the club skate deliriously up and down the ridged muscle. He watched the other man's eyes following an oily drop of sweat as it traced a crooked line down Christian's stomach.

  The other man nodded again, throat working as he swallowed convulsively. Christian grabbed him by the hand and dragged him toward the bathrooms. A programmed laser light show spelled out the club's name across the walls. Men stumbled out of the washrooms, shirts wet with sweat and pants soaked through with glittering oil and water.

  Christian head learned a lot since coming to California. After the paranoiac horrors of the eighties and early nineties, the fast and easy style of West Hollywood gay life had returned with something approaching a holy fervor. He could hook up sometimes three or four times in one night, and be home in time to catch the late-late movies on cable. He never got tired of the noir classics: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and NORA PRENTISS. Night after night he fell asleep to those great old stories of losers losing.

  Once in the bathroom, Christian turned back to his mark. "You're a librarian, or a teacher, or something?" Christian said, already loosening his belt. "That's hot. Makes my cock hard." The guy wore a wedding ring, and Christian felt cold excitement bubble up in his chest. Odds were even whether or not the guy's wife even had a clue about her husband's double life. Most wives, deep down, sensed the repressed past and desire that drove men like this out to the clubs, and ignored it as best they could.

  "Wait." The man put one dove-white hand on Christian's arm. "Please. Not like this."

  Christian snorted. "Too late to back out now."

  "I mean not here. Can we...can you...outside?" His glasses flashed in the cold white light of the bathroom.

  Christian laughed. "No one cares in here, man. You want it, then this is it."

  The man slid his hand lower, gripping Christian with surprising strength. "I'll be good," he whispered. "So good. I promise." He moaned when Christian grabbed him by the throat, and Christian smiled approvingly.

  "OK. You'd better be." He shook him by his neck. "Now move."

  They pushed through the throbbing crowd. The bouncer, a big black power top named Ramage, gave them a curt and knowing tilt of the head toward a security door. Christian shouldered his way through it, into the deafening silence of the alleyway. He sucked in air, tasting the filth and garbage and Hollywood's dirty breeze. He pulled the smaller man further down the alley, feeling the thump of the bass in his chest still, even through the concrete walls. "Mm, this was a good idea. What's your name?"

  "Ryan." A fake name, Christian knew, but one that suited him. A weak name that pretended strength. "What's yours?"

  "My name is Christian."

  He turned to the little man. "But you will call me Sir." Ryan stood in the oily shadows of the alley, head down, in a classic subservient post. Traffic noises droned by, a never-ending river. Christian strode up to him, grabbed a fistful of his graying hair, and titled his head back for a kiss. At the last second, the little man pulled away, and Christian's lips scraped against the man's stubbled chin. "Come here, you little bitch." This was the part of LA he loved. Here, he felt power. Had power. Men and women looked him in the eye and then looked away, recognizing the force he carried inside. He leaned forward to nip at Ryan's ear, and caught the fleshy part between his teeth. The little man gasped and mewled with pleasure. Christian kissed him, feeling the click of their teeth, sucking in the taste of cigarettes, the tang of the gin Ryan had been drinking.

  Christian reached under his shirt, and pulled out a long-bladed hunting knife. He raised the knife and felt Ryan stiffen with fear.

  "You fucking queer," Christian said. He poked at Ryan's belly with the knife. A bloom of red rose there, and the man whimpered. Christian poked again, now at Ryan's crotch, and again, on the shoulder. Each prick of the blade sent an icy bolt of anticipation into Christian's belly. Along with the excitement, a sensation of something red and crawling, an urge to cause pain—pain for himself, and for others. For everyone. "Goddamn pansy, spreading your diseases and sickness. Infecting everyone with your filth." Christian laughed at the horrified expression on Ryan's face, and grabbed the smaller man's hand. He held it in his own pale grip, and drew the steel smile of the knife across the other man's palm. Ryan cried out miserably, snuffling back tears that threatened to spill from beneath his eyeglasses.

  "Please don't, please don't. I have a wife—she doesn't know—I have kids, for God's sake, just let me g-g-go-"

  Christian wrapped his hand around Ryan's, then both of their hands around the knife. He squeezed, s
miling as the joints in Ryan's hand groaned in protest. Ryan moaned and stammered a litany of promises, pleas, regrets. Christian sneered and placed the tip of the blade against the taut, tattooed flesh of his own belly.

  He thrust his body forward into Ryan.

  The knife punched through the skin, into his stomach. The shock rippled outward from the blade, sending waves of cold through him. He leaned in, pushing the knife deeper. He felt the dark pull of some nameless hunger urging him on.

  Christian slammed his head into Ryan's nose, feeling it break with a meaty crunch under the bony prow of his forehead. He growled in Ryan's face, and when Ryan screamed in response, Christian darted forward and bit at his lower lip, tearing off a pink hunk of meat. He lunged again, biting at Ryan's nose, his cheeks, his eyes. He ripped an earlobe off with his teeth, opened a gash over his eye, all the while pushing Ryan against the wall, forcing the knife deeper.

  "Fuck me with your knife," he hissed into Ryan's bleeding face, and spit in his eyes. Ryan screamed and sobbed, begging for release.

  The club door slammed open, and Ramage thudded into the alley, unzipping his pants. His eyes went wide. "What the fuck?" He lunged toward the struggling pair, but before he could reach them, Christian tore off down the alley, grinning his burning, hateful grin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sugar laid out her tools: hot water, towels, tweezers, a bottle of vodka, and a tiny pair of eyebrow scissors. She adjusted the tilt of her makeup lamp, bringing her face into stark focus. The thread in her eye had grown, just over the past hour. Now it extended out almost to the tip of her nose—and was it thicker, as well?

  A memory of her mother, screaming and clawing at her own skin, tearing red furrows into the flesh as she raved about lizard-people and bugs crawling under her skin. She used to swear she could see them in the shadows, thousands of tiny red eyes following her everywhere. That was before they moved to California.

  She gritted her teeth and splashed vodka into her mouth. She leaned forward into her mirror, crossing her eyes to bring the waving thread into view. It was definitely thicker now.

  She had a moment of panicky doubt. What exactly was she playing at here? This could be anything: some kind of parasite, some exotic disease picked up off another actor. She should be at a doctor's office; hell, she should be at a hospital. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't normal, and thinking she could just pluck it and be done was a dangerous idea. She needed nurses, and drugs, and calm, competent doctors.

  Then she thought back, to other hospital visits, other doctors. Her mother screaming and thrashing in her restraints, while the doctors assured her they were doing the best they could. She recalled once storming out after a raw argument with one of the clinical psychologists, a screaming match, Sugar leaving with: If that's your best, you aren't doing enough.

  "Toughen up, Sugar," she told herself. "Suck it up and do it."

  She wound an inch and a half around one fingertip, and gave it an experimental tug. The pain was immediate and swooning. She panted a moment, wiped the palm of her other hand on her shorts, gritted her teeth, and yanked. She screamed.

  She had read somewhere that the brain has no nerve endings. Could have fooled the fuck out of me, she thought, when she regained herself. Pain-sweat sheened her brow, and she took a slug of vodka, hissing at the burn.

  She swallowed back nausea at the way it wriggled between her fingers. Just pretend it's stitches, just pretend it's stitches. It felt like the thing was knotted up inside her head, wrapped around important structures in her head. She pulled slowly, and her eyeball bulged out. Her mind offered HD quality fantasies of yanking on the thread so hard that her eyeball popped out of her head, and skittered across the floor like an ice cube.

  The mirror was magnified, supplying more detail than she wanted. The fiber was black threaded with blue, red, green, and some like transparent human hair. She tried picking it apart, first with the tips of her nails, then with the tweezers. It was like picking at a root. Tiny flakes of the stuff dusted her lap, but she was getting nowhere.

  She picked up the scissors and with her other hand, pulled the tip of the thread as far away from her as possible. The scissors sat touching the thread, ready. She took a deep breath.

  snip

  Pain exploded behind her eyes like a nova, and a klaxon-like shriek punished her ears. Her own voice. Dark fluid dripped from the severed end of the thread, spattering her legs. The burgeoning light in the apartment dimmed, like a cloud had passed in front of the sun, and she realized her vision was dimming. Another gulp from the vodka bottle. Her vision swam for a moment, then snapped back into place.

  She leaned in again. Another quarter-inch of the thing stuck out from her eye, whipping back and forth. As she watched, the snipped end took on a rough edge. It was growing back.

  She blew a lock of hair out of her face, captured the waving tip with the tweezers, and began to wind it around like spaghetti on a fork. She prepared herself, the cords in her arm standing out in stark relief, muscles flexed, arms shaking. She began to pull. More. Don't stop don't stop, keep going, don'tstopdon'tstopgogogo

  Finally, she felt it start to come: the feeling of it sliding out of her was excruciating but somehow pleasurable, like rocking a loose tooth back and forth, feeling it give, the potential to tear free with a satisfying wrench and a burst of quick pain. She shouted in horrified triumph as the string emerged from her eye, inch by bloody inch. It kept coming, far longer than she would have thought possible. It hit a snag and she cried out miserably. She gave it a vicious yank, and screamed at the resulting pain.

  "Shut the fuck up, you bitch!" her neighbor shouted, pounding on the wall.

  "Fuck you!" She screamed back, and fell over, the long bloody thread clutched in her hand. It was out.

  Exhaustion filled her like warm water, and she lay on her back on the bloody towel. She could smell her own sweat, and above that, the rank coppery flavor of fear and blood.

  The thread lay curled beside her hand. She rose unsteadily and fetched a lighter, and set fire to the thread. She watched, fascinated, as it caught alight. It thrashed in what looked like agony.

  "Suffer, you fucker."

  Her phone buzzed against the coffee table, rattling against a plate. She picked it up to turn it off, saw who it was, and stopped cold.

  The name JYNX blinked at her in bright, poisonous green. She found the connect button with one shaking finger.

  Ragged, panting breath, then Jynx's voice, raw and edged with panic. "Sugar? Please come. Something is happening to me. Something bad."

  Jynx hung up. Sugar stared at the curled crisp of the thread, then got to her feet and started getting dressed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two weeks ago, the itch had become unbearable. Christian scratched unceasingly, obsessively. He wandered the LA streets, scratching, scoring alongside the other addicts. They fell by the wayside to sleep off their binges; all of them picked, scabbed, encrusted with dirt and blood—but the unceasing deep-seated itch under his skin would not let him stop his nightmare journeys. He staggered on and on, his eyes burning. He spent night after night trolling the seedier side of the LA gay clubs. He encountered rougher and rougher scenes, and found that he liked it, as long as he was on top. The more cruel he could be, the better. His partners, eyeing his lean body, hard blue eyes and craggy features, always let it be known that if he wanted to choke them, slap them, even knock them around, then that was OK. Some of them wanted knives. Christian was OK with that too.

  He was unmoored, floating through the underside of a city where everything he had ever wanted was available for one price or another. Money, flesh, pain, blood: the same currencies as Kansas, except here in California, they had actual street value. It wasn't just the strong taking from the weak: it was a constant ebb and flow, a whirlpool of souls circling an enormous drain that ended up in hell.

  He awoke that morning in a stinking puddle of rainbow-sheened water. His memory was empty; the previous week
was like a black lump of stone in his mind.

  His skin crawled with bugs. Every inch of him tingled and writhed, like pins and needles over every inch of his flesh. He jumped to his feet and clawed at his clothes. He ripped skin along with cloth, and found nothing but cuts, scabs, dirt, and that interminable itch. His fingernails, caked with filth, scraped at his flesh, which goose-pimpled in the morning air.

  The sun broke over the hills, painting the streets with mellow gold. A few joggers ran past, carefully not looking at the screaming thrashing man as they veered to the opposite side of the road. Birds scolded the sun fiercely, then flew on toward the day's errands. The streets below began to clog with traffic like cholesterol.

  His breath stuttered out on agonized shortened breaths. He muttered to himself, kicking off his torn jeans and tattered loafers. He stood in the brisk, polluted air, and suddenly the itching stopped. He panted, the pale concave bowl of his belly jumping as he sucked in air.

  He blinked, and his arms were veined with thick, black, twisting threads. They pulsed and wriggled like fat black worms just beneath the surface. He filled the air with hoarse, guttural screams. A fire-spot of pain bloomed on his arm as a twisting thread broke the surface of his skin. Blood welled up around the tip. Then another, and another. In seconds his arm began to resemble a white candle dripping red wax and spiked with black thorns.

  More threads emerged from his legs, his chest, his back. He scratched madly, cringing at the coarse, thorny feel of the growths. His fingers spasmed as the threads inside him tugged and pulled and wove their way through the meat of his arm. He felt them twisting around his tendons, pulling them tight, and the grotesque feeling of them worming their way into the fat blue veins of his arms and legs.

  Then they were gone. Not disappeared, like some drug-induced hallucination, but sucked into his body with a chorus of tiny slurping sounds.