Bullet Through Your Face (improved format)

by Edward Lee

  As was his habit now, Rudy pretended it was the pillar of his own manhood that was being so fastidiously gobbled up by Beth’s suckto-wake-the-dead yap; it was the only way he could tolerate this—to fantasize. But when he eventually relocated the wares of his prostate gland and balls onto the Scotchguarded carpet, the fantasy shattered. His own release was a mere dribble compared to Gormok’s veritable whale blasts of sperm, which Beth allowed her face to be showered with as the alomancer gibbered in glee . . .

  VII Rudy knew it would happen eventually, but he had a contingency plan for that too. One night he woke to find Beth staring at the big bay window in the bedroom.

  “Honey?” he feigned. “What’s wrong?” “I can’t even sleep anymore. I can hear him down there. He jabbers all night long.”

  This in fact was true. Even from the basement, Gormok could be heard mattering inanities in arcane languages, and bubbling nasal laughter. Well, maybe if you fucked him a little better, he’d simmer down, Rudy thought. Ain’t my fault you’re a dull fuck. Suck his big dick harder—try that, bitch. Suck his ass—that’ll keep him happy.

  Beth sat on the bed and began to cry.

  “Sweetheart,” Rudy offered a phony consolation. “Don’t cry.”

  “You said we’d get married,” she sobbed. “You said we’d have children.”

  “Honey, we will.”

  “When, Rudy? I need to know when.”

  “Soon, I promise.” He stroked her hair, kissed her teary cheeks. “I’ve got a plan,” he whispered. “The race track, the ball games and all that? That’s smalltime.”

  “What are you talking about?” she sniffled.

  Rudy reached into the night stand. “See this? It’ll set us up for life in no time, honey.” What he showed her was the NASDAQ Index of The Wall Street Journal. “We’ll be millionaires, Beth. And then, I promise you, we’ll get married and have kids just like we planned.”

  “Please, Rudy, please,” she sobbed, hugging him back. “I promise,” he reasserted. “But you’ve got to give this just a little more time. Okay?”

  Beth’s sobs began to abate.

  “Honey? Okay?”

  “Okay,” she croaked.

  “Oh, Bethieeeeeeeee!” shot the voice from below. “Come hither, please!”

  VIII Within a few months they’d moved out of the A-frame in favor of a waterfront estate. The his and hers Mustangs were replaced by his and hers Lamborghini Diablos. Rudy merely had Gormok perform a few divinations, then laid his money down at a broker’s. It didn’t take long. Blue Chip stocks. Municipal bonds. T-Bills. Not to mention the thirty-million in 6-month CD’s. Even in the highest federal and state tax-brackets, Rudy had enough to keep them pig-shit rich for life. And that bevy of call-girls? Well, now they were his girls. He had thirty of them, one for each day of the month, and he put them all up in luxury condos he paid for in cash. Things weren’t bad. No, not bad at all.

  And Rudy found a great solace in his calendar-month of bimbos; they provided him the escape his psyche needed, the abstract catharsis which relieved the entails of his complicated, high-stress lifestyle. Plus they fucked good, which furthermore relieved the hatred he now harbored wholesale for Beth. Rudy got lost in his women, and this banished the steady and bothersome awareness that his fiancé was impaling herself on a “bigger” man than he, limblessness notwithstanding. Becky was his favorite, a slim, sultry blonde, whose specialty was tongue-baths, which made Rudy a great adherent of personal hygiene. Then there was Shanna, the full-tilt brunette with a rack of tits you could use to drydock a Los Angelesclass sub, and a welcome propensity for always asking Rudy to enter through the, uh, back door. And we mustn’t forget Chrissy—now there was a woman! She had looks that would make Jessica Alba seriously consider suicide, not to mention a mouth that could suckstart a Ford Tri-Motor.

  Yes, Rudy’s buxom recreational brigade all proved quite adroit at helping him cope with his problems, to the extent that his only real problem was wondering just how much joy juice his vesicles could manufacture. A man could only put out so much, but lo and behold, his girls were always ready to prove that he was possessed of an endless reservoir of love lava. And on those dread occasions when he felt the old crane simply wouldn’t rise, his bevy of beauties were always quick, by their sheer expertise to prove a grand synonymy with Jesus—in that they could raise the dead. Rudy loved his women, he cherished them. And whenever he grew sick of one, he simply dumped her and found someone else. Just as there was no shortage of beer in Bavaria, there was no shortage of beautiful women who liked moolah. What a life!

  In the meantime, Rudy urged Beth to research, as thoroughly as possible, every aspect of Mesopotamian mythology, ancient ritualism, pre-Christian divination, and the like. She even found one book called The Synod of the Alomancers, and learned everything about the Cenotes of Nergal, the Nashipus, the Ashipus, the ziggurats, and all the intricacies of the regalia and the ritual. Rudy felt this necessary in order to make Gormok feel more at home. He had contractors make a mock temple out of the basement. He purchased real censers and thuribles, standards and statues and murals etched with the holy glyphs. He even had a clothier make a special hooded black robe and sash, identical to those worn by the ancient alomancers, which he donned each time he asked Gormok The Talking Torso to perform another divination. Rudy wanted the atmosphere to be right for his dismembered bread-winner; he figured it was the least he could do.

  On the other hand, though, Beth grew more and more sullen. She rarely even spoke, not that Rudy was around much to talk to— his harem kept him busy, when he wasn’t busy himself wheeling and dealing at the broker’s. Beth became stoical, morose. Now, the ludicrous head atop the diviner’s torso insisted she service him many times a day, amid an array of kinky twists which were better left undescribed.

  But more months went by.

  And Rudy’s fortune increased exponentially.

  IX It was funny, sometimes, how the universe worked. Rudy recalled telling Beth once that there was never enough, but actually, now, he found he was wrong. Already he was one of the richest men in the country. What more did he need? So it was rather appropriate, in a cosmic way, when Beth walked into his den one evening and dropped the bombshell:

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. At first Rudy felt enraged. “Pregnant! You’re shitting me! This is a joke, right?”

  “It’s no joke, Rudy. I’m pregnant.”

  He gnashed his teeth and jumped up. “You mean you let that goddamn horny torso knock you up?”

  “I have to fuck him ten times a day,” she drily pointed out. “What did you expect?”

  “Well—well, goddamn it, Beth! I thought you were on the pill!”

  “The pill isn’t foolproof, Rudy.”

  Calm down, boy, he induced himself. Don’t panic. “Yeah? Well, it’s no problem. You’ll simply get an abortion.”

  Her face looked carved in granite. “I’m not getting an abortion, Rudy. I’m having this baby.”

  “No. You’re not.” He opened and closed his fists, to quell his rage. “You’re not going to have a kid by that thing’s spunk.”

  “Thing?” Beth chuckled. “I thought he was our man. Forget it, Rudy. I’m having this baby. You won’t give me one, so I’ll settle for Gormok’s.”

  You evil calculating bitch, he thought. You did this on purpose, didn’t you? You went off the pill on purpose just to put me on the spot.

  “But I’m willing to make a deal,” she went on. “I will get an abortion on two conditions. One, you make me pregnant, and two, you kill Gormok.” Then she passed a small box to him. “Open it,” she said.

  Rudy opened the box to find it occupied by a Smith & Wesson Model 65 .357 Magnum.

  “You’ll do it right now, Rudy. No more lies. No more false promises. You’ll dig a grave in the back yard. Right now. And then you’ll take that silly thing outside and you’ll kill it. And I mean right now.”

  Rudy didn’t care for being dictated to, especially by a wo
man. So she’s calling the shots now, huh? Beth the little Torso Fucker. Well . . . It was all he could do not to smile.

  “All right,” he told her. “You’ve got a deal.”

  Rudy found the shovel. Then he went out back,

  He’d been thinking along these lines for a while now anyway, hadn’t he? The shovel bit into the soil. He didn’t need any more money, which meant he didn’t need Gormok, either.

  And there was one more thing he didn’t need:

  Beth, he thought, and grinned.

  He’d gotten what he wanted out of her. And another point: she was starting to look really beat these days. Skinny, pale, dark circles under her eyes. I’m a high-roller now, he congratulated himself. Why’s a big time, big-buck guy like me need a little-tit stringbean bitch like her?

  He could move his harem here! Shit, those girls made the Playboy Mansion look like a dog pound. And there were some new ones now too, like Beverly: California tan, waxed pubes, 40 doubleD’s and nipples sticking out like a pair of golf cleats. Her tits should hang in The National Gallery! he reveled as he dug. And Melissa? A cosmetic-surgery paragon; she had a body on her that would put a stiffer on the Pope! Then there was Alicyn, whose vaginal barrel was more dextrous than an olympic gymnast. Oooo-eeee! he thought. Not to mention Shelly and Kelly, two brick-shit house redhead twins whose favorite bedroom game was “Sandwich.” Rudy never hesitated to play the part of the cheese.

  There were so many, an endless Whitman’s Sampler of sex! Shit yeah! I’ll move them all here! The entire bimbo brigade! I’ll build a fucking luxury apartment complex in the back yard! He could picture it. A different chick every day, a mass orgy every night! He’d eat Beluga caviar out of nut-tan bellybuttons, abdomens. Slurp Perrier-Jouet from Tit Valleys. Blondes on the half-shell, baby! Redheads Au Gratin, and Brunettes Au Jus! I will live like a Renaissance prince! Yeah. And Gormok? And Beth? Rudy’s grin darkened in the moonlight. He rested a moment. Then he began to dig the second grave.

  “You come out here with me,” he insisted. “I need you to hold the flashlight.”

  “All right,” Beth agreed. “And bring the gun.”

  Even bereft of arms and legs, Gormok was not easy lugging up the stairs. The fucker weighs more than a pallet of bricks! Rudy thought between grunts. Then, as he lowered the torso into the wheelbarrow, Rudy winced as if slapped. Gormok, apparently unable to control his renal system, urinated quite liberally into Rudy’s face.

  Beth laughed.

  “Dear Rudy, ho!” Gormok exclaimed. “My deepest apologies!

  Such incontinence, I assure you, is quite a contretemps!” “Don’t worry about it,” Rudy forced himself to reply, dripping warmly. “I guess a man’s gotta go when he’s gotta go.” “And, goodly friend, hast lovely Beth enlightened thee? The wondrous news that the harvest of my loins hast given her a belly large with child?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Rudy replied. His back strained as he trundled the wheelbarrow along the pool deck. “That’s, uh, that’s why we’re going out back, you know, to have a party, just the three of us.” “Great Ea! My joy comes unbridled!” Gormok exclaimed, close

  to tears. His stumps roved in glee. “A celebration!”

  There’s gonna be a celebration, all right, Rudy avowed as he grunted onward. I’m gonna bury both of you whacks, and celebrate by pissing on your graves.

  The great back yard of the estate shimmered in quiet moonlight.

  It was warm out tonight, and pretty--a great night for burying people.

  Rudy pushed the laden wheelbarrow to the back of the property. He hefted Gormok’s trunk and set it beside the first hole. The mound of freshly turned soil blocked the second hole from Beth’s sight. “But such a strange place for a celebration,” Gormok’s head

  remarked, craning atop the torso.

  Rudy took the gun from Beth, who stood aside with a smirk.

  He checked the cylinder, saw that it was loaded, then snapped it shut with a flip of the wrist.

  “Do it now,” Beth ordered.

  Rudy smiled. “What I’m gonna do, you torso-fucking little slut, you Babylonian-cum-swallowing whore, is kill the both of you.”

  Then he aimed the revolver at Beth’s stone-cold face.

  “Go ahead,” she told him. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been planning? Use your brain, Rudy. Think! Gormok’s an alomancer—he can foresee the future. If you think all we’ve been doing down there is fucking, then you’re even dumber than I thought.”

  “I . . . You . . . ,” Rudy said in perplexion. What the— “I had the guy at the gun shop take the powder out of the bullets,” Beth next informed him. “It won’t fire.”

  Rudy snapped the trigger a dozen times, each drop of the hammer resounding in a quick metallic click!

  “But this one will.”

  Rudy peed his pants when Beth pointed another revolver in his face. “Now . . . kill Gormok,” she said.

  “With what?”

  “I don’t care. Just kill him.”

  The gun barrel steadied on the point between Rudy’s eyes.

  A moment later, he had his foot behind the shovel, the blade at Gormok’s throat.

  “Have no fear, dear Rudy,” the torso strangely commented. The silly face smiled in moonlight. “Fate beckons us all, the joyfilled summons of providence.”

  Beth kept the gun on him as Rudy bore down. He stomped the back of the shovel until the blade separated Gormok’s head from the armless shoulders. Blood pumped from the stump, soaking Kentucky Blue sod. Rudy kicked the head into the grave. “And now you kill me,” he said, turning.

  “Oh, no,” Beth replied. And before Rudy could turn completely, she brought the gun-butt down hard on his skull.

  EPILOGUE Rudy would’ve been wise to read some of the books he’d had Beth get out of the library. Gormok had verified all she’d discovered. The spirit of a condemned salt-diviner could never be killed, only the body it happened to occupy at the time. The spirit merely moved onto possess the body in closest proximity.

  Later, Beth calmly buried Gormok’s head and torso. She also buried Rudy’s arms and legs. Then she went downstairs, and to the basement’s new tenant, she whispered, “Goodnight.”

  “On the morrow, my sweet beauty!” Rudy’s head replied but in the familiar high, nasal warble. “I bid thee the most heavenly dreams!”

  Now she could have all the babies she wanted. It wasn’t like Rudy was going anywhere. And if she ever ran short of money . . .

  There was always the ashtray, and the salt.

  THE REFRIGERATOR FULL OF SPERM

  I “Hey, Chief?” Hays said. “I ever tell ya about the time I was goin’ down on Jinny Jo Carter, then all of a sudden all this gonococcal pus starts runnin’ out of her snatch?”

  Just as these eloquent words were spoken, Chief Richard Kinion had bitten into a stacked B,L’n T from Ma’s Market, heavy on the mayo as usual, and in perfect synchronicity with his deputy’s reference to gonococcal pus, a goodly share of that mayo squirted right out onto Chief Kinion’s tongue.

  “—squirted right out onto my tongue, and I mean a lot of it, Chief, like a big wad of the stuff,” PFC Hays calmly continued with his tale. “Shee-it, I’ll tell ya, boss. There I was one minute eating the beaver’a one’a the hottest chicks in town, and next minute I got myself a mouthful of venereal discharge, yes sir! God knows how much I swallered ‘fore that big wad come out.”

  Chief Kinion paled, spat out the bite of the B,L’n T, then chucked the rest of it in the wastecan. He gagged at the image.

  “Gawd-daggit, Hays!” he eventually was able to object. “You out’chore mind tellin’ stories like that when a fella’s tryin’ ta eat!”

  Hays swiveled in his seat behind the booking desk. “Aw, sheeit, Chief. I’se awful sorry, I shorely am. Didn’t know you’s was havin’ yer lunch. But ain’t that about the low-downedest thang ya ever heard? Here this gal was knowin’ full well she got the clap but she didn’t even tell me till afters I got a
mouthful. I’m munchin’ her carpet fierce, boss’n alls of a sudden start ta taste something real bad, and that’s when she say ‘Oh, Micah, honey, don’t mind that, it ain’t nothin’ but a li’l gonnococal pus, accordin’ to the doctor.’ So’s then I lookit her cooze and I’se see it, Chief. Looked kinda greenish, it did, with a little yeller in it, and—oooo-ee!—did it stank fierce—”

  Kinion cracked out another gagging cough, his formidable stomach tensing into a knot. “Shut up, Hays, fer Gawd’s sake—”

  Hays creaked back further in the chair, eyes closed during this recollection of one’a his many exploits. “And . . . you know what it tasted like, Chief? Remember last Fourth of Jew-lye when Pa’n Ima Parker brung that big vat of ranch dip that went bad? Tasted just like that Jinny’s twat-pus did. Put my wood down fer a week, Chief—I mean Jinny’s pussy, not the ranch dip—and I’se wanted to bitch-slap her so bad fer pullin’that stunt, but, a’corse, I didn’t ‘cos Micah Hays don’t never strike a woman.”

  Kinion sat bent over the wastecan, his mouth cranked open, and sweat breaking on his brow. No, no, please, he thought. He didn’t want to be vomiting in the station; such an act would not seem becoming of the Luntville Chief of Police. Eventually, though, his stomach settled down and he reclined back, pawing his massive belly.

  “Hays, I don’t never wanna hear another’a yer dirty stories. Ever! Ya hear me?”

  “Right, Chief. But I’ll tell ya, there weren’t nothin’ dirty about this—this here were a disgustin’ story. Dirty’s somethin’ else, ‘cos, see, a dirty story’s a story that gits yer wood up. Like . . . I ever tell you ‘bout the time I gots together with Mary Beth Banner and her

  twin sister Alice?”

  “Hays, don’t—”

  “Now that’s a dirty story, Chief—I’m gettin’ lead in my pencil just thankin’ about it! I had me one ball in Mary Beth’s mouth, the other in Alice’s, and one each hadda finger up my ass whiles their pussies’re taking turns on my face. And this were purdy snatch,