Shrieking Jay lifted his head up a few inches to greet me, drooled a bit on his pillow, licked at the snot on his upper lip and went back to sleep.
Screw had a few more racks of flash but no new art, so the walls offered nothing new. Since there was nothing else going on, I stared at the red blood cells languidly swimming from one side of the aquarium to the other.
A faint sound came from my belly. Philippe was trying to say something. I looked down and saw my shirt moving. If he got no response, Philippe would sometimes start chewing whatever was covering him just to nag me into interacting with him. On this particular night, he could very well eat the whole shirt and go fuck himself while he was at it. I was on a mission and nothing was going to distract me.
A few minutes later the record ended and I could hear the screams of a customer. The stink of burning flesh managed to conjure up all sorts of extreme scenarios. Finally, fed up with the waiting and the smell, I got up and went into the dark hallway behind the counter.
The movement was enough to silence Philippe. The mouth was probably scared and had no idea where he was. Considering my knife antics earlier that day, he was probably thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts.
A skewed rectangle of light climbing up the wall meant that the first door on the left was halfway open. Gage’s office. The stench of scorched flesh got stronger as I approached and a strange electrical hum came from beyond the door.
“Gage? You in there?”
“Is that you, Gut?” asked a voice from beyond the door.
“The one and only, baby.”
“Get your ass in here, man. You don’t have to wait out there all by yourself.”
I pushed the door open and peeked inside.
Gage was sitting on a black stool in front of a naked man. The man was crucified to a metallic, black St. Andrew’s cross; the typical X-shaped cross that every self-respecting sadomasochist has in his or her bedroom or basement dungeon.
The man’s penis was covered in blood and the red mess was running down his legs. A black leather mask covered his face except for a whole that left his mouth uncovered. An intravenous drip was hooked to his left arm. The tube that went into his arm went straight to a hanging bag of Algolagnix on the other end.
I looked into Gage’s only eye and smiled.
“What are you up to, Titface?” I asked while looking at the lily-white, dark-nippled breast that sprouted from the left side of Gage’s face.
“Not much, man. I’m almost done with this guy. You here to see Screw?”
“Yeah. Is he around?”
“He’s working on a lady right now. Take a seat over there and I’ll be with you in a minute.” Gage pointed to a stool in the corner of room. It was next to another aquarium. Instead of water, this one contained about a foot of a gelatinous substance that quivered constantly like a flan in the hand of a Parkinson’s patient.
“Hey, Boobface, what’s in the aquarium?”
“Platelets,” replied Gage without looking away from the man’s penis. “It’s a new safety regulation. We had a few hemophiliacs who didn’t say shit when they filled out their papers and... well, now every center has to have one of those.”
“Why not just let the dishonest assholes die?”
“Because if we do, then we have to clean up all the blood and fill a ton of paperwork.”
“Hmm. Makes sense.”
Gage didn’t reply. I sat down and watched the artist work.
He had the crucified man’s penis in his hand. Well, one side of it. Apparently he was using a small laser to split the thing in half. I wondered how he managed not to botch such a delicate job with the messed depth of perception that comes with having only one eye.
The electric hum came back and Gage applied the cauterizing instrument to the man’s half-split unit. The guy started screaming again. At the end of every howl, a smile crossed his lips. The bifurcated dick twitched in a silly attempt at becoming erect while gushing blood. Just then, a spurt of blood flew over Gage’s head and landed behind him. A quick flick of the humming/splitting apparatus and the blood squirting was over.
I couldn’t stomach much more so I looked at Gage’s left arm. In order to maintain artistic symmetry, Gage had covered his left arm with human nipples from wrist to shoulder. Just like in the real world, the nipples ran the gamut when it came to color, width, species and length. Some of them even sported shiny stubs or gold hoops.
The next few minutes were more of the same. Finally, the splitting was done. Gage disinfected the two halves and coated them with a liquid plastic that was protective, adhesive and antibacterial. Then he released the guy and removed the leather mask.
“How are you feeling?” Gage cleaned his equipment, wiping up blood.
“I feel alive!” said the man. “That was the most exhilarating experience of my life!”
“Yeah, I know. I would put it somewhere above bungee jumping and below raping a biomechanical gorilla.”
“Fuck bungee jumping, bro! This is the real deal!”
“Glad to know you’re happy,” said Gage with a slightly dismissive tone.
“What do I owe you?” asked the man while he walked to the corner and picked up his clothes.
“It’ll be a hundred. And remember: no long baths, no playing with it for a while and no scratching the plastic off because, if you do, it will heal all wrong and the two halves will try to stick together, got it?”
“Sure. Here you go.” The semi-dressed man handed Gage a few bills, stepped into his pants, picked up his shoes and walked out buttoning his shirt with one hand. It seemed like he was in a hurry to get home and be alone with his new toy.
“So what’s up, Gut?”
“Not much, Gage. You do a lot of those?” I asked pointing at the empty doorway.
“Penis splits? Sure. I guess the shop as a whole does about ten or twelve a week.”
“Looks painful.”
“You bet your ass it’s painful. That’s why they do it. Your tool is chuck-full of nerve endings; more than you can imagine. You see that little bag up there?”
“The Algolagnix? Sure. Does it really work?”
“Like nobody’s business. They get a few drops of that in their system and you can hack off their legs with a blunt hatchet covered in salt and they would laugh and ask for more.”
“But that dude was screaming.”
“They all scream. It’s some sort of weird psychological reaction, you know?” explained Gage. “Since they know it’s supposed to hurt they imagine the pain, but what they really feel is the pleasure. Their receptors are all fucking tied in a confused knot. They scream out of fear or confusion or imagined pain or whatever the hell is going on in these fuckers’ sick heads.”
“If you say so.”
“Gut, I’ve seen people bleed to death while asking for more. I’ve had clients that ask me to cut off all their limbs in a single session. Shit, I had a woman in here last week that wanted me to imbed a bunch of small nails all over her body so that every movement she made would send her into a pleasure whirl. Said she got the idea from some guy at the Church of Albert Fish.”
“Did you do it?”
“Hell no, you can only keep someone going on Algolagnix for a few hours and then you have to stop, otherwise their brain shuts down. If I had done it, she would’ve passed out from the pain the second the Algolagnix wore off.”
“Interesting job you have.”
“Yeah, it sure beats flipping synthetic burgers for a living.”
“I bet it does,” I said. “Hey, how long do you think whatever Screw is doing is going to take?”
“Let me finish here and I’ll take you there. He should be just about done.”
“Do your thing.”
I stepped out of Gage’s office and waited for him with my back against the wall. Screw’s door was barely distinguishable at the end of the hallway. All the information Gage had given me had me wondering about what the best approach would be for what I had in
mind.
I could try to convince Marie of doing something ordinary like a bit of nipple torture or maybe a bit of cutting, maybe even a finger, but she would never go for the hardcore maiming stuff. Plus, that would only happen after she underwent a salamander DNA treatment. Those were the rules. If she did that, it would bring back her leg, which was something she would never allow to happen. Also, kinky as she was, she disliked the sight of blood. Even if she eventually agreed to undergo the treatment, the experience of losing her leg had most likely traumatized her. I didn’t think she would even discuss erotic amputation.
Then I thought maybe I could use that bit about the nerve endings to convince her of some genital punishment experimentation. Screw could just mistakenly allow her to stay on the Algolagnix for too long...
Gage came out of the room with a small backpack in his left hand and a set of keys in the other. He closed his door and turned to me.
“Did I tell you I finished Amanda?”
Amanda was one of Gage’s ex-girlfriends. He had agreed to help her out with one of her radical body art performances.
“No, you never told me. Is she happy with the outcome?”
“I don’t think so. We found out after we were almost done that there was no way to cram her larynx anywhere on the body.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t know whether she likes it or not because she has no voice. Her lips, tongue, larynx, vocal cords, teeth, lungs, stomach, kidneys and other bits and pieces are in my freezer at home.”
“Hold on just a minute; how does she breathe if she has no lungs?”
“She doesn’t. The serum I give her keeps the tissues oxygenated. You have to remember this was an experiment and at some point we’re going to put her back together. Right now we are just using the parts that we need like the skin, eyes, hair, most of the bones, fingers... that kind of thing.”
“And when will you put her back together?” I asked, trying hard to grasp the extent of what the man with the boob on his face was saying.
“I don’t know. The thing is that it all worked great on paper but we don’t know how to reactivate the circulatory system or how to remake a bunch of other things we chopped up, destroyed or simply lost during the process.”
“Can’t you do it with electricity? Shock the heart to make it start pumping again?” I remembered a few classes here and there.
“The heart pumps just fine, but for the whole thing to work first we have to put all the veins back into place and…it’s just a mess and a lot of work.”
“Well, that sucks.”
“Yeah. Come on, I’ll show her to you.”
As we walked, Gage’s face-breast bounced up and down just like a normal breast would.
“Hey, Gage,” I said pointing at his face. “You ever thought about giving that thing some tan lines?”
Gage’s elbow hit me right on the ribs. I doubled over and clutched my side in pain. He said, “Maybe you should pimp out that thing you have on your gut. I bet you could teach it how to give blowjobs to truck drivers for ten bucks a pop.”
“Listen, you bloody cunt, why don’t you go sit on some trucker’s face and tell him all about your brilliant ideas?” Philippe chimed in.
“Hah! I’d never heard that abomination talk before!”
“Abomination strikes me as a bit of a heavy word for a man who’s currently depriving some village of an idiot.” Retorted the mouth.
“Wow, Gut, he’s witty, too. You sure you don’t want me or Screw to try to sew him shut?”
“Feel free to address me, you inconsiderate hog. I’m the one you’re talking to,” said Philippe before I could reply.
“Tell that thing to shut the hell up, man.”
“Philippe, be quiet for a while,” I said.
“All you ask me is to be quite,” whined Philippe. “Maybe you should be quiet for a while. Maybe I’m tired of listening to you. Maybe…”
With one quick motion, Gage stuffed a corner of his rucksack into Philippe. It surprised the hell out of me, but it got the job done. When Gage removed the rucksack, the mouth remained quiet.
“Glad that worked,” said Gage. “I don’t know how you can deal with that blabbing thing everyday.”
“Sometimes I ask myself that same question,” I replied, still clutching my ribs.
Gage shook his head and the tip of the nipple swung from left to right in an arc that almost hit the right side of his face. I followed him down the hall.
Almost at the end of the hallway, about five feet from Screw’s closed door, Gage unlocked a door on the left and popped on the light. The flash of bulbs were blinding, but our eyes adjusted as we went inside.
With a sweep of his arm, Gage introduced his magnum opus. “What do you think, Gut? Pretty cool, isn’t she?”
All of their previous conversations had done nothing to prepare me for what I saw. By some unimaginable rearrangement of bones and other bodily materials, Amanda was a bicycle. Thousands of stitches crisscrossed her twisted body. Tubes protruded from her thin frame in odd places. Amanda, a woman I had once known, was now an atrocity wrapped in artistic intent and propped against a dirty wall.
“She thought people would immediately get the innuendo, you know? Go for a ride, ride a girl, etcetera,” said Gage.
“She’s… she’s a fucking bicycle!” was all I could say, feeling simultaneously fascinated and repulsed.
“Yeah, it took me almost two months but she’s all done,” said Gage, his voice filled with pride. “She’s so well put together that you can even take her out for a ride.”
“Are you serious?”
“Hell yeah, man, the only thing that I would change is that I have to bring her back here every three or four hours to oxygenate the tissue or it’ll start to rot. Other than that, she runs like a dream. Look at the thick wheels I put on her. I’ve been thinking about using some of the leftover bones to make some rims.”
Gage explained that the small box in front of Amanda’s front wheel pumped liquid that oxygenated her skin. Her two plump butt cheeks served as the seat and her arms were twisted to make the shape of the handle. The frame itself was a collection of irregular bits and pieces. Most of it came from her legs, but Gage had used many parts to build the rest.
Amanda’s boobs hung from the top tube, one near the head tube and the other almost under the seat. Stainless steel rings hung from both nipples. On top of the down tube, her ten toes were sewn in from largest to smallest, giving the impression of a stubby crest. The chain was made from her smaller vertebrae and some tiny bones I guessed came from her fingers. The peddles were her scapulas. Finally, on a small fleshy panel stuck between the handles, right where the reflective light should’ve been, a pair of bleary red eyes stared back at us.
“She looks good to me,” I lied, trying to ignore a small twitch on one of her fingers. “What are you guys going to do next?”
“Well, I don’t know. Amanda originally wanted to do this in order to enter some competition but I’m pretty sure we missed the deadline. At some point I’ll get around to creating a voice box for her and then maybe I can get her to talk. It’d be pretty cool to get her into some sort of show, you know? Get her someplace where people get to see her and appreciate what we have done.”
I couldn’t help stealing a few more glances at the bike as Gage talked and then a few more when he did a little motion with his chin that signaled the end of the conversation and made the boob on his face jiggle yet again. My mind was officially blown.
We started to walk to the door and I looked at the Amandacycle one last time. Tears were filling the groggy pair of eyes between the handles. With my back to it and a creeping sensation clawing at the back of my legs, I was glad to leave the room.
Gage locked the door behind him and we walked to Screw’s office.
Gage knocked a few times and a voice screamed from inside.
“That you, Gage?”
“Yeah, man, I’m here with Gut.”
<
br /> A few seconds went by and then the door creaked open.
Screw stood there, tall and rail-thin. The smile on his lips fully displayed his metal teeth. The multihued silicon spikes sprouting from the top of his brow and ending at the nape of his neck gave him a perennial Mohawk. He was wearing elbow-high black latex gloves. His exposed biceps and shoulders were covered with colorful, moving tattoos. A bug-eyed koi fish swam against the current in a blue river on his left arm as a few cherry blossom flowers spun wildly on top of the water. On his right arm, a series of tribal designs rearranged their pattern constantly while humming an almost imperceptible tune. His black, sleeveless shirt read “Rutger Hauer is fucking God!” in blocky white letters.
“Gut, my friend, always the impatient one,” said Screw.
“Good to see you, Screw. You busy?”
“I’m almost done. Come in.”
“Actually, I’m heading out,” said Gage. “I have a client that wants me to make a house call. She wants a Persian cat skin graft on her back.”
“Alright, Gage, Just make sure you bring your shit back clean,” said Screw pointing at the backpack.
“Will do. Wish me luck; I hope to be balls deep in her honeypot before the stroke of midnight.”
“Good luck,” I said.
Screw just looked at him and shook his head. “Take a seat over there, Gut. I’ll be with you in a minute and we can get the hell out of here.”
Gage patted me on the back and left. I stepped into Screw’s office and shut the door behind me.
There was a table in the middle of the room. A chubby woman was spread-eagled face-down across it, held down by a strange metal contraption that resembled a big saddle with spider legs. Her reddish skin tone meant she probably had some demon blood. She was facing the door and her long black hair cascaded all the way to the floor. Her gigantic, pendulous breasts seemed to be caressing the table underneath her.
I moved to sit in the plastic chair in the corner and noticed something behind her. I made it to the chair and could see that there was a muscular, skinned animal halfway up the woman’s rectum. There were cables attached to the legs of the creature with a bulky mess of electrical tape. They led to a small box on the floor with buttons on it.
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