by Steve Vernon
“What’d you do that for?” Maria asked. “Law and Order is coming on.”
“It’s probably a repeat,” Malcolm said.
“I want to see it anyway.”
“My back’s killing me babe. We can watch it upstairs, can’t we?”
He resisted the urge to drop any hints. He didn’t want her to see this coming. That’d kill the mood for sure. It definitely had to be spontaneous.
She didn’t argue. It was more comfortable upstairs for watching television.
He remembered when they’d moved the old television upstairs. For the first six years of their marriage they had resisted the idea of watching television in bed. There were too many other things to do in bed.
Then one day he’d bagged a big bonus and treated the household to a new television. Rather than bother with trying to sell the old one, or worse yet just dumping it on the curb, Maria suggested we move the old television upstairs.
How quickly things change.
“I’m going to the kitchen. Maybe make some cocoa.”
“That’d be nice,” Maria said. “But I thought your back was hurt? Are you sure you don’t want me to make it for you?”
No damn it, Malcolm thought. I want you to make it with me.
“The moving around will do me good,” he told her.
And that was that.
♥♥♥
He heated the pot of milk, stirring the cocoa in with heavy spoonfuls, to mask the flavor of the fly. He read the instructions.
Then he poured two cups, one in Maria’s favorite mug. Then he added the Spanish Fly to Maria’s mug.
How many?
Shit, there were no instructions.
What kind of a dosage did this involve?
He shook in a good-sized handful of Spanish Fly. It looked pretty, kind of a cross between powdered emerald city and fine dried parsley.
“Somewhere over the rainbow,” he sang to himself.
“Honey, hurry up. You’re going to miss the beginning of the episode.” Maria called down.
“Coming, sweetheart,” Malcolm called.
He added some baby marshmallows. They melted and clustered together, like wet fungus.
Then he went upstairs, carrying the mugs.
That ought to work, shouldn’t it? Chocolate was supposed to be an aphrodisiac, wasn’t it? And besides, hadn’t Seymour said the Mayans invented chocolate? To Malcolm’s way of thinking that made for a perfect blend.
He walked into the bedroom, nearly tripping over the throw rug and spilling the cocoa.
“Hey babe. I made it just the way you like it.”
She reached for the mug.
“Thanks honey. You’re the best,” she smiled up at him. “Don’t ever change.”
For an instant he nearly changed his mind.
And then she reached up and took it from him.
Before he could say anything she took a sip.
And then she swallowed.
Too late.
It was done.
“Hmm, this is good,” she said.
“Drink it down while it’s still warm.”
He felt like shit, but he hoped it would be worth it.
♥♥♥
The stuff worked fast.
By the time Arthur had finished his first tough talk to Jack McCoy, Maria had her panties off and three fingers buried up her steaming pussy. She was hotter than a week of foreplay.
Malcolm leaned over her. He could feel the heat radiating off her skin. She was damned near burning up. Her flesh seemed to move, like it was molten lava.
Christ, she was hot.
He touched her lips with a sweetheart kiss. She clamped hold of him and dragged him down to the bed, sucking her mouth onto his with a pressure that was damned near pneumatic.
Her tits were high and hard and hot, the nipples like ruby bullet branding irons, scorching into his skin. He ran his hands over her. She arched herself against him, grinding her pelvis against his groin.
His cock stiffened to attention beneath his pajama bottoms.
He didn’t remember getting naked. It happened that quickly, as if she’d grown an extra set of arms in order to tear his pajamas off.
And then he was inside her.
He’d never felt her so warm, so wet, so damn tight.
“Fuck me hard,” Maria begged.
He didn’t need any coaxing. He rode her hard, humping it into her. With every thrust she rose up to meet him, grinding her clitoris hard against his pelvic bone.
She came like she couldn’t stop coming.
He pushed up, pulling himself free, struggling to catch a breath. He figured he’d catch his breath and then get his turn at coming.
Maria had other plans. She grabbed him hard by the ears.
“I hope you’ve got gills,” she said, before pulling him face first down into her cunt.
Malcolm licked for dear life.
After a time he thought he could hear the sea.
The sea, and something buzzing.
♥♥♥
She fell asleep something like a quarter after her fifteenth volley of orgasms. Malcolm had never seen the like. He’d known a lot of women, at least three, and never had he seen such passion. It was like having group sex with a single person. It was like living in a Penthouse magazine, she was suddenly so wild and uninhibited.
It had pretty nearly killed him.
He lay there, slowly catching his breath. He was totally happy, but totally depleted. How the hell could he keep this up?
He’d have to invest in some serious vitamins.
Or maybe the Spanish Fly might work for him, as well.
He watched her laying there, her chest rising and falling, rising.
Shit.
Her chest wasn’t rising.
It was growing. It was rising and swelling from sensible handfuls to high ripe melons. Her nipples lengthened and changed in color.
More disturbing were the tiny tentacles growing from various parts of her abdomen.
What was in that Spanish Fly?
She was turning into some kind of a monster.
She opened her eyes and looked straight up into his.
Oh hell.
“Maria,” he whispered.
He lay back down onto their bed. This was crazy, but she was his wife, damn it. And besides, she was hot.
He was amazed to find himself growing another erection. He thought he was finished, but when he looked into her eyes, everything changed. He slipped his erection into her. He felt tiny fingers inside her cunt, skillfully manipulating his cock, bringing him to an even higher pitch of excitement.
The two of them fucked like a platoon of oversexed minks. She continued to change, in midfuck.
And each new Maria incarnation demanded more and more sex.
Malcolm kept trying to please her, trying every position he could think of. Between lovemaking bouts he choked down vitamin tablets and protein shakes and ginseng tea to keep up his energy level.
Nothing seemed to last for long.
And then finally he took the Spanish Fly.
Six weeks later everything had changed. Malcolm and Maria barely left the bedroom. The two of them were screwing like the world’s largest free love commune. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Seymour, since that night in the bodega, and he didn’t really care. Malcolm the multiple orgasm king was having a great time with Mondo Maria, trying hard not to think about that cluster of throbbing eggs hidden in the bedroom closet, jellied beneath the shoeboxes and slippers and lost socks.
And the buzzing.
Wetside Story
There is nothing more beautiful than a dead fish under moonlight. There’s just something in the way that their scales catch the dance of lunar beams and streetlight and shard it back into your eyes like a perfect cod liver oil slick.
Bucky threw the mackerel high over the deep water and Big Stinky rose up and caught it.
“Damn, that’s pretty,” I said.
Bu
cky grinned me back a picket fence full of pleasure. The toxic waste that riddled his cavities gave them a wonderfully fluorescent neon gleam. His scales glittered as prettily as those of the dead mackerel had.
My heart went thump.
Bucky and I had been lovers for damn near ever, since about three minutes after we’d first met. Not that it’s all that much of a deal, mind you. Cross-current sexual practises aren’t nearly as commotion-worthy for us Wet-siders as it is for you inter-city pinks. This was our sixth summer together. I hadn’t realized I was a sea-fag until I met Bucky. Things can happen awfully fast, here in Darktown.
“You want me to throw another?” Bucky asked.
I shook my head. “No. I just took a swim and I wouldn’t want Big Stinky going all technicolor in the mouth on us.”
Darktown was where the monsters lived. It had been built back in the 1930’s when Senator McCarthy had decided that in addition to blacklisting authors, actors and directors that film monsters also needed to be attacked. His campaign against the film monsters had proven to be so successful that a congressional committee came up with a plan to segregate all of the monsters from proper society.
“Shh, Finn, she’s sensitive.”
“She’s a two hundred foot bulimic sea monster who weighs about as much as a half dozen fully loaded super tankers and that’s talking post-barf. The word sensitive just doesn’t come into it.”
“Finn!”
What can I tell you?
I’m just not one of those sensitive kinds of squids. They call me Finn and I’m the war leader and head bullyboy of the Dread Darktown Cephalopodic chapter of squids. We’re the original squids, the primal spawn and I don’t care what anyone else tells you. We don’t claim to be descended from any dubiously tentacled elder god. A bunch of freaking name droppers I call them. Hell, half of them couldn’t even pronounce the elder god’s true name.
I knew better. Forget about all of this guppy-swallop about in-the-elder-god’s-image. No sir, we’re just a handful of bottom-sludge social climbing molluscs that have crawled up from the mud and made good.
“Don’t you remember last year when Big Stinky swallowed that school of killer whales and then power-hurled them up onto the beach? The damned deadheads frenzied into the freshly spewed mess and we were cleaning up zomboid orca fish-chunks for two full moons!”
“Even deadheads have got to eat,” Bucky said philosophically. “Besides, some of that zomboid orca was pretty good eating, not that I would know.”
“Right,” I tactfully agreed. As much as I loved Bucky there was just so far I could expect his gustatory predilections to expand. Basically, Bucky was a goddamn eating machine. “Just save the fish for later. We got business to do. Are you packing?”
“Loaded with bear,” he said, pointing at his extra-caliber double barrelled blunderbuss.
“Don’t you mean loaded for bear?” I asked.
“I generally say what I mean, Finn. I’ve got this sucker loaded with gunpowder, tomb dust, rusty nails, broken glass and a string of medicine bear teeth that I won in a Texas Hold’em poker game with the Manitou Man. Like I said, loaded with bear.”
What can I tell you? Wetside is a little like Texas. Everything has to run to the larger side of big. What you need to realize is that Wetside is home to a significant portion of Darktown’s heavy-hitting giant lizards. Like Bogart said, they come here for the waters. When you weigh as much as a small sumo planetoid, the flotational qualities of the deep Atlantic are not to be sneered at. So, naturally, we have to be ready for the occasional Tyrannosaurus temper tantrum, when Gwangi goes orangoutang-o-rango.
We’re talking a need for maximum firepower.
“Right,” I said. “Loaded with bear. I got you.”
“How about yourself?” Bucky asked.
“I got Betsy.”
“Durn it Finn, when are you going to trade that popgun in for something with a little more kick?”
I patted Betsy’s butt. Betsy was my gun, only calling her a gun was a little like calling King Kong a spider monkey. Betsy was a hatchet handled semi-auto shotgun with a graveyard frame and a full clip of modified tombstone load self-preaching bone-stoppers.
“I got kick enough, right here.” I assured him “And if Betsy ever lets me down I’ve got a half dozen back-up guns hidden up in my sleeves.”
I flexed all six of my biceps hard enough to give me a walking cerebral haemorrhage, and not in a good way. I could bench press a fully grown zomboid killer whale without breaking a single bead of sweat, not that I’m trying to brag.
“Cave fish,” Bucky called me.
“Bottom feeder,” I returned. “You know we’re not supposed to be here to shoot anyone.”
Bucky sighted down the barrels of his blunderbuss. “I’ll try and keep that in mind,” he said. “But has anyone told the Nazi Zomboids Uberbottoms that?”
I looked out onto the water. There was no sign of the Zomboid Uberbottom Death Sub, but I could see the mermaids singing in the distance, capering out their long fishnet tails and hungry toothed veils, patiently seining the churning surf for whatever bit of meat they could find. Our petty politics and playground fistfights didn’t concern them one bit.
Maybe they had the right idea.
“If those Nazi zomboids don’t know that we’re on a peace-keeping mission,” I said. “I reckon we’ll have to remind them of that particular fact.”
“You figure he’ll hold up?” Bucky asked, pointing towards the FBI agent, who was hunkered behind a barrel of diesel oil, probably the last piece of cover you’d want to hide behind in a firefight, looking as officially well-hoovered as he could manage.
“You can never tell with pinks,” I answered. “But he’d better learn fast.”
I figured we were going to need everything we had, going head to head against the Auf Wiedersehen Oom-pa-pa Zomboid Nazi Uberbottom Unterseeboot Deathclan.
♥♥♥
It started with love.
Now there’s a four letter word if I ever heard one. There has been more trouble generated by that particular noun/verb than any other crossbred term found in the history of verbal and nonverbal communication.
Don’t believe me?
Ask Helen of Troy.
Or Goldie.
Goldie was the son-spawn of Kahuna Ghul, one of the prime leaders of our little waterside clan. It seems Goldie had fallen head over heels in love with an Auf Wiedersehen Nazi Zomboid unter-Kapitan. Kahuna Ghul had sent for me to tell me about it. I guess I must just have that kind of face.
“It happened during a river raid,” Kahuna Ghul explained. “As near as I can tell that kid, Goldie, took one look at that Nazi zomboid unter-Kapitan and started getting unnatural kind of ideas. The next thing I knew he’d run off and was trying to cross over.”
“Have you tried talking with him?”
“I sent him a message.”
“And?”
“He mailed me back his left ear.”
“I guess that’s his way of telling you he isn’t listening,” I observed. “You’ve got to love those Van Gogh moments.”
“It’ll grow back,” Kahuna Ghul pointed out.
“Doesn’t mean he’ll listen any better,” I remarked.
“It’s damned unnatural,” Kahuna Ghul said. “But what the hell can I do?”
I looked at him, trying to be gentle in my irritation. “He fell in love with another fella. Is that what you call unnatural?”
He threw me a dirty look but I refused to catch it.
“I know about you and Bucky. That’s different. At least you’re both squids. Zomboids and squids shouldn’t mess with each other,” Kahuna Ghul said. “The sooner they illegalise inter-special cross-breeding the better, I say.”
“Uh-huh,” I said right back.
I didn’t want to get into any discussions involving politics genetics, race or religion. Conversations involving those four apoplectic horsemen just have the damndest knack for running downhill at a full
tilt gallop.
“You got something to say on that?” Kahuna Ghul asked.
“I figure love is an ambivalent son of a bitch who’ll bite anybody he takes a fancy to,” I said. “Who am I to tell you how to go about suturing that particular open wound?”
Diplomacy has ever been the better part of my valour.
“Like needs to stay with like,” Kahuna Ghul maintained. “Zombies and squids ought to stay on opposite sides of the water.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“It’s against nature. I mean, how are they going to spawn?”
“Uh-huh,” I repeated.
Who says squids don’t have rhythm?
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Kahuna Ghul asked. “Uh-huh?”
“Uh-huh,” I clarified. “So why’d you name him Goldie?”
Bullseye.
Kahuna Ghul spent a half a moment studying the seaweed and jetsam grain on his clam-top desk.
I had clearly embarrassed the man.
“It was his mother’s idea,” Kahuna Ghul finally allowed. “She named him after a fish.”
“His mother slept with the fishes?”
Kahuna Ghul said nothing but his silence spoke volumes. I guess a fellow can pick at a scab for an awfully long time.
Finally I let him off the hook.
“Look, your wife isn’t the first squid to go ga-ga over a guppy,” I said. “And Goldie isn’t the first squid bastard to cross over to the zomboids and this isn’t any of this sea-fag’s business. I’m going back home and me and Bucky are going to get down over some hot buttered sea bass and deep fried prawns. There’s no telling what unnatural activities might follow such a gustatory fiesta. Meanwhile, you ought to learn how to deal with all of that water you got running under your bridge.”
Kahuna Ghul didn’t have anything else to say to me, so I left. Bucky was waiting outside of the big man’s office.
So was the FBI.
♥♥♥
“Finn?” the FBI pink said to me.
When pinks start calling me by my first name I generally start reaching for my gun. I had Betsy out and pointing at the pink’s head when three more pinks stepped out with their own guns pointed right at my face. The fourth pink ignored Betsy and drew his own pistol. I just stood there and let him get away with it.
For now.
“Four pinks against one unarmed squid,” I said. “I call this a Mexican stand-off.”