Gutmouth

by Gabino Iglesias

  “You really think she had a thing for you, don’t you?”

  “Are you mental? She found me funny, cooked me food, allowed me to insert my tongue in her gash and rode me until she almost passed out. Were you not there for all this, mate?”

  “I guess I was. I…I need some time to digest all this. Just leave me alone for a while, will you?”

  “No problem, but keep in mind what I told you.”

  The conversation left my head spinning so I decided to go out for a mind-clearing walk.

  Without having breakfast, I got my clothes and shoes from the safe, dressed and left. My feet carried me straight south to Shlicker Park. I sat on a bench, eyes still blurry with drink, heart broken and senses reeling. For the next few hours, I sat and watched the serpent-trees snag bloated pigeons in mid-air. The crunching of their tiny bones mixed with the frantic cooing from the survivors to create a perfect melody for a Saturday morning in the park.

  Street performers were power-vomiting into plastic baskets set about fifteen feet from them. A parade of sad individuals walked through the park, lovingly dragging a plethora of indescribable monstrosities from all sorts of leashes. Old geezers met in a corner to play a bit of explosive chess, but the whole thing ended up in a half-assed geriatric fistfight. A naked midget with a tattooed-on kimono appeared out of nowhere and began giving a martial arts demonstration with nunchucks made of toothy, hairy teratomas.

  Through all this, I remained impassive, my thoughts elsewhere. Finally, feeling hungry, pissed and depressed, I began the trek back to the apartment.

  On my way home, my thoughts alternated between ripping Philippe out with a meat hook and using that same meat hook to teach Marie a lesson about fidelity.

  The bloody thoughts triggered a memory and a beautiful song from my youth came to mind. A band called Cannibal Corpse had been around during my teenage years. Their music would be considered soft and tame by current standards, but back then they spoke to me on a level that no one else did. A tune called, Meat Hook Sodomy played in my head as I walked.

  “I explore my thoughts through murder,” said the song. I wondered if a little meat hook dentistry would do the trick with Philippe or if using the same tool to rearrange Marie’s colon was the way to go. Inexplicably, the love I felt for her had quickly turned into hatred. The idea that I could bleed to death trying to detach Philippe from my gut while Marie remained unharmed and revered by throngs of fans seemed preposterous.

  Remembering the song also took me back to my youth, when we had to put up with police shutting down parties and prostitution and drugs were illegal. Now I was contemplating one of the only few serious crimes left: murder.

  Less than three decades earlier people had feared war, pestilence, a solar flare, the year 2012 or a nuclear holocaust while they ate their worm-burgers and sipped on their mutated-bean lattes from slightly radioactive foam cups. Few imagined that their passion for voracious, senseless consumption would do them in. Few imaged the bloody pandemonium that MegaCorp’s global coup d’état brought to them in HD the second they released their trained killer biomechanical apes, mutating water viruses and mercenary humanoids. In a week they had caused government after government to fall like the powerless pricks they’d been all along. It served them right for trying to impress us with their half-assed attempts at control and regulation. Everyone knew multinational corporations owned everything, the only difference was that MegaCorp had gotten rid of pesky governments, prohibitive religions and annoying dissident groups.

  Oh, what a beauty it had been to watch organic farmers being ripped in half by the powerful paws of biomechanical apes high on meth and pumped full of steroids. I had particularly enjoyed watching chai-drinking, granola-munching health nuts being decapitated and processed in order to feed MegaCorp’s army of giant acidic slugs.

  I had also enjoyed watching those giant slugs slither all over once-important buildings and corrode them to the ground along with the silly, worthless, flawed, unfair ideologies they contained. Those humans that survived the first onslaught actually thrived in the New World, but now I was forced to wonder if it had been worth it.

  Lost in thought, I reached my street and my building. Just like that morning, piercing screams were coming from the Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center.

  I stood still, enraptured by the sounds. A realization dawned on me with the force of an exploding star. Death brings new beginnings. It was a lesson everyone could learn from our New World. An end meant a beginning. The blood of politicians fertilized free thinking. The death of religion carried with it the end of war. A New World sprouted from the bloated carcass of that vile worm that had once been called democracy, in which the attainment of pleasure was an everyday occurrence. So what if we have to buy unnecessary shit? Who truly cares if what we eat and drink causes a few mutations here and there? All that death was just an introduction to new life.

  In a way, homicidal thoughts were dancing in my head since the second Philippe’s 9-inch snake slapped against my belly, glistening with Marie’s juices in the moonlight. Those thoughts suddenly took center stage—prancing around in all their vengeful glory. A headless Marie danced naked under the rain among a forest of swaying skeletons in my head. The sheer beauty of the vision squeezed a tear from my eye.

  “I’m hungry,” interrupted Philippe.

  “Don’t fret, man, I’m going to make a little pit stop and then I’ll feed you.”

  “Sweet, mate.”

  The sign on the wall read: Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center #1143. The place was run by my friend Screw who was somewhere in the back of the shop, mutilating someone. The screams suddenly stopped, but it was just a matter of sticking around for a few minutes and they’d start up again.

  I walked to the door, yanked it open and yelled: “Hey, Screw!”

  “Who goes there?”

  “It’s David!”

  “Gutmouth! Long time no see, buddy, what can I do for you?” he called from the back.

  “There’s something I have to talk to you about…can we meet for a drink later?”

  “Sure, man, I’ll be done here at around nine.”

  “Same place as always?”

  “Hah! You know me, Gut, I love that joint.”

  “See you there, bud.”

  I closed the door as the buzz of a power tool started and a long scream ending in laughter followed. I climbed the stairs to the apartment and had to fight four klepto roaches on the stairs. Apparently they had stolen some pills from an apartment which made them grow to about two feet long. They grabbed my right ankle and tried to pull me down. The crunch of their exoskeletons under the weight of my foot had a soothing effect on my soul. Good thing I was wearing boots.

  While Philippe chewed and slobbered, the screams downstairs came at random intervals. They made me think about the flood of physiognomy-altering products and procedures MegaCorp had put on the market immediately after they took over. Those had truly changed humankind. The DNA-altering treatments, appendage-growing pills, interspecies skin grafts and the lifting on all bans and regulations when it came to body modifications was only the beginning. In a matter of months, biological subdermal implants and the deregulation of all genetic mutation processes turned the city into a freaky circus.

  Obeying the most basic instincts of human nature, people immediately began experimenting with ways of deriving pleasure from these changes. Horse-sized penises and hairless, hypersensitive skin were just a start. As soon as people found out that a salamander DNA treatment would allow them to start regrowing a severed limb immediately after amputation, the real party began.

  With this new demographic in mind, MegaCorp created a drug called Algolagnix; a yellowish serum that would turn pain into pleasure by stimulating neurological dopamine and endorphin receptors in the brain and then twisting them into a delicious knot.

  The idea took off with a vengeance.

  Within a year every neighborhood in town had an officia
l MegaCorp Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center. Screw ran the one beneath my apartment—open six days a week. He and his crew also did a little tattooing, piercing and extreme body modifications such as skin grafts, sex changes, limb splitting, appendage implants, duplication, scarification, organ replacement, bone expansions, interspecies grafting and a wide array of cosmetic surgeries.

  Since seeing customers leave Screw’s shop in a body bag was not a strange occurrence, I made up my mind to talk to him about some safe disposal methods. Maybe I could talk Marie into trying some kinky mutilation that would just happen to go fatally wrong. It’s easy to sneeze when you’re using a laser or a butcher’s knife. In fact, once you have someone drugged up and in a horny frenzy, the possibilities are endless.

  I had an inkling that Screw could be easily convinced to help out. If the kindness of his heart faltered, there were things that could help persuade him: a night with three furry prostitutes, a date with that neighbor on the fourth floor that had the ten foot brain sticking out of her skull, a box of fuck-cakes or a trip to the private room at the Ampu-titties club for a half-hour spank session with the Colon Sisters.

  If none of that worked, I could just remind him that I provided half a dozen alibis per week for him and his crew and that more than one business violation on their part had gone unpunished thanks to me. Though Tony was always the one who found someone to torture instead of Screw and the one that did all the fake paperwork.

  To kill some time before the meeting with Screw, I took my pleasurebot out of the closet. It would be nice to release some of the tension that had stayed in my system from the previous night. Semen retentum venenum est!

  The pleasurebot wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead. I didn’t have a spare. I opened the back of the bot and pulled out the dead creature. Its limbs were muscular and grey. I didn’t know why MegaCorp couldn’t come up with a creature that lived a little longer.

  Instead of throwing the small creature in the trash, where it would start smelling quickly, I simply left him on the floor. The klepto roaches would surely make quick work of it.

  Before frustration could set in, I recalled an interactive sex book someone had given me as a birthday present. It was safely taped to some other books underneath the bed.

  I walked over and pulled out the heavy package.

  The title I wanted evaded me, but I remembered the author: Carlton Mellick V.

  It turned out to be the fourth in the stack.

  I pulled it out and taped the rest together again to keep the klepto roaches from dragging them away.

  The title was, Amazonian Sex-Assassins of the Apocalypse. The dust jacket showed a big-breasted blonde woman wearing a loincloth. She held a bloody axe in her right hand and the head of another woman, a full-lipped brunette, in her raised left hand. The cover was appealing so I went to the index and read the names of the chapters. Big, Sexy, Sweaty Combat was the title of chapter four. I decided to play that one. I pressed the raised ink and set the open book on the floor.

  Two huge ladies wearing nearly nothing and swinging clubs above their heads materialized. My small apartment was suddenly filled with the erotic grunts of the two babes. Their matching red manes lit the room. Despite their sexy, half-assed fight, their considerable size soon became a problem as their struggle threatened to break everything.

  I stood up and closed the book. The women disappeared. Still concerned about unfulfilled needs, I turned on the computer and quickly concocted a little fantasy, emailed it and headed down to the Pregnant Purple Porpoise, a club about three blocks down from Ampu-titties.

  At the club there was a group of nervous, sweaty men waiting in line outside because some tub of lard had suffered a heart attack inside. Workers were chopping him up to remove all eight hundred pounds from the cyber-encounter lounge. They fed the chunks of fat guy to a gigantic red toad with a nasty set of teeth. The toad would occasionally fart tuba notes, and puffs of blue smoke sprinkled with musical notes pooted into the air.

  Finally, after the toad’s tremendous feast, they vacuumed the blood and soaked the floor with disinfectant. The anxious crowd was let inside and relief shown on the face of every shifty-looking fucker in the joint.

  I made my way to a booth.

  A wrinkly, olive-skinned dwarf arrived with clean equipment and handed it over. The dwarf’s eyes had been tattooed yellow and he had finger extensions on both hands. Each finger had three proximal phalanges instead of one, so they could bend five times. I wanted to ask him about it, but he left as soon as the equipment was out of his strange hands.

  I stripped, swallowed the pill, put on all the paraphernalia, sat back down, closed my eyes and waited for the buzz.

  I opened my eyes when I felt myself swinging.

  A beautiful malachite sky dotted with white, spiraling clouds surrounded me. Winged beasts flew far away. When I looked up I saw the beautiful underside of a gigantic flesh dacraena draco looming above me.

  Pink braided intestines filled with delicious vanilla pudding sprouted from different parts of my back and chest, keeping me airborne. The dragon tree began humming an ethereal tune and one of the flying creatures approached, right on queue.

  Although the reptilian face, green skin and huge white wings did a lot for her, the woman they had assigned to the job still retained some of her features: a big, flat nose, thin lips and stringy hair. The combination was grotesque but the timer was running so I told her to pleasure me with her feet as she tore the braided intestines one by one with her fangs.

  With the taste of vanilla pudding in my mouth, its refreshing coolness and delicious aroma all over my face and more of it acting as a lubricant, I felt my orgasm approaching. A small hand signal told the sex creature to cut the last of the intestines and I plunged into the endless malachite abyss. My own pudding erupted into the air and joined its sugary counterpart. There’s nothing like an orgasm at zero-gravity.

  A small time miscalculation meant that I ended up free-falling for a few minutes rather than the ten or twelve seconds I had expected. The experience was good, but it didn’t compare to the avocado and furries episode. At that point, I was sure nothing would.

  I showered as soon as I got home and then sat by the window to kill the two hours before the meeting with Screw.

  As I watched the vacant street below, my mind played short movies of Marie’s death. From decapitation at the hands of a skilled blind samurai from an old movie to a gruesome end at the ravenous mouths of a pack of hairless wolves that Tony kept for special occasions, each end my imagination conjured for Marie was enacted inside my head in all its gory glory. With each one came the elation one feels when a dream is about to be achieved.

  The musings were interrupted twice. The first time by Philippe, who claimed he was famished. A look at the safety-fridge only produced a box of stale crackers that he wolfed down with his typical indiscrimination. The second interruption came in the stunning form of Star, the only female at Screw’s shop.

  She was leaving the shop in her four-legged, oxygen breathing giant Fugu fish. I called out to her and she waved back. Her long legs, which had coiling snakeskin grafts that went from her groin to her ankles, wrapped around the poisonous fish.

  I stared at her long red hair, slender figure and mobile tattoos. At the sight, my broken heart began to mend. I imagined my hands playfully following her nomadic ink. Ah, the miracle of decorated skin! The sheer beauty of an ornamented human casing! I watched Star gallop away on her fish. I decided then and there to pursue her love as soon as the present mess was over.

  When she was gone the monotonous emptiness of the street and the slowly setting sun started depressing me, so I got dressed and walked downstairs to wait for Screw at the shop.

  On my way, I thought of how to ask Screw for my deadly favor without sounding like a maniac.

  Halfway down the stairs, a raspy voice said “Come on, Gonzalo, mommy needs to prepare some soup.” It was the small old lady that lived somewhere on
the third floor. She came up the stairs very slowly, holding the banister with her right hand. She held a leash with in left hand, attached to a gigantic snail. It must have weighed fifty pounds. The old lady’s hairy tail moved with a vigor that made her look younger.

  I wondered what new pet scam MegaCorp had going on but decided not to ask.. The bent old woman’s tail swung up every few seconds to smack at imaginary flies on her neck. I took another look at her snail and decided they were paired perfectly—both slow and ugly.

  Bursting onto the street with anticipation, I threw open the door to Screw’s Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center. The smell of burning flesh hung heavy in the air and the hammering beat of Screw’s second CD rattled the speakers in the corners..

  The song was the third track on the record, That Weird Thing in the Gutter. The thud of two double bass drums, or the “vicious quaternary stampede,” as some critics liked to call it, sounded like a machine gun on fast-forward. The drummer, a long-haired skeleton of a man called Draggle, had four legs. All of them ended in the most impressive calves in the history of rock and roll.

  In Star’s absence, there was no one at the counter so I sat on a huge black leather sofa that covered half of the right wall, to wait. I thought about yelling for Screw, but the musical onslaught was restraining. I knew he wouldn’t hear me.

  It reminded me of the few times I had seen Assless ChaMps, Screw’s postmodern zombie industrial torture rock band. The messy, violent, wild performance had only lasted about 20 minutes or so, but the aftermath of the surreal thunderstorm of sound kept my ears ringing for a week.

  A huge aquarium stood against the opposite wall. Inside it, red blood cells the size of coffee plates floated around like lazy jellyfish in some transparent goo. Under the huge aquarium was a large red pillow that contained the limbless, bean-shaped body of Shrieking Jay, Screw’s pet and instrument. Shrieking Jay was subjected to the vilest, most shocking and painful torture imaginable, but the guttural wails that came out of his toothless mouth were the element that really brought Screw’s band together. Without his damaged vocal cords, their primal and tortured sound would be impossible.