Gin stumble-slides into the cactus sculpture, and gets his leg stapled between two limbs, with a dozen long needles through his ankle, trapping him beneath the stampede. All he sees is a repeat of combat boots stepping on his body, but his body can only feel mental pain.
The blue woman slices reckless, trying to claw all the way through my body. Blood whipping off of me with the pulsation, soaking the sheets brown.
My screams continue. She starts punching me with her left arm as she continues to cut me with her right claw. Fists nail my face and mouth, maybe so I’ll stop whine-yelling.
I put my arms around her neck and squeeze, choking some pain back in her direction, but she seems to like it. And it gets her more excited, throwing more punches, with both hands this time. Beating my shank inside of her, beating blue knuckles onto my face…
The front door breaks away and Christian is tossed into the blood dance that cyclones him away from the street people, who begin crazy on the punks as they dance by. Battering orgy. Boot Lips continues screaming with gore leaking from his forehead into his eyes.
The street people enter the dance. Their skulls smash into the deadly artwork as they try to get to Sid to stop him from singing so harshly. Some begin ripping the place apart. Skinheads slice into them with knives and hammer them with chains belts.
The blue woman stops beating me when I climax — squirting blue woman food into the eating hole. She seems to climax too, vibrating her thigh muscles and lower lips. But it’s not a realorgasm. It’s just the blue woman’s mouth-like vagina slurping up my juices to process them into her system. I go dry and her vibrating stops. She falls onto my mutilated body, stinging the wounds as she rubs herself…
I can sense her smiling with satisfaction, licking the blood from my face with her chilly tongue. Then she falls asleep with her face on my raw-beaten skin.
The street mob makes it to the band, to Boot Lips, and destroys all the equipment.
The music ends.
I hear the combat-scramble continue — yelling, smashing, pounding — throughout the rest of the night. Falling into my head, staring at the whirling ceiling. I am a shredded towel underneath a sleeping dog.
The blood trickles quietly.
Scene 18
The Death of a City
Rippington died last night.
It just looked at all the people in its belly and figured that its life wasn’t worth carrying around anymore, since the citizens were ungovernable and incapable of becoming civilized ever again. It found no reason for itself to go on.
So it rolled over in its bed and died.
This morning, its rotting corpse can be sniffed in the air, all over the streets and inside buildings. Madness-rain is pepper in the grey sky. There aren’t anymore businesses or any money being circulated. No one has any food or water left to survive on, and nobody cares. No one even has sense enough to leave town to search for food; they’re all just waiting to die and become zombiefied.
Rippington is no longer here for us. No more city for us, we’re just living inside its remains, mutating into nothing but remains ourselves.
And little boy Earth watches us die and giggles.
I awake to the rain tapping on the ceiling and the blue woman lapping at my damages, sucking on my shank with her eating hole — not hungry enough to eat, just vagina-licking it, like a funpop — propped on top of me again.
When she sees me awake, she gives her tongue a rest and glares at me. Her BIG eyes — engulf-swallowing me like normal, but something is not all-normal about this look. There seems to be something new added. It almost seems like… love.
Just as I see this look, I feel it coming on… a love-passion moment, which she hasn’t felt for me even though we’ve had sex many times, thinking that it was impossible for her, impossible for blue women to love because they are machines.
And just as any two regular human beings tossed into such a situation, we bend our necks forward and wrap ourselves into each other, lips into osculation, kissing.
I soon feel human again.
I thought the act of kissing became extinct long ago, even before the walm, people just stopped caring enough to kiss before fucking. Love is a dead performance. Only the hardcore fuck job is required.
But here love is, right between us, flaming up and stabbing us.
And it is almost beautiful, in a pedophiliacal sort of way.
Richard Stein said that love pops up when you least expect it.
He also said that alcohol can play a BIG part in the birth of love, even though love is only love because of drunkenness.
The killing of a buzz can kill this emotion very quickly.
After a few minutes of passion, a slug of mucus-goo — a squirming worm-ball — crawls up her throat and into my mouth, sliding down my throat too quickly for me to react.
It chokes me with its intense, porkfat scent, this large regurgitated stomach booger, which goes down my throat and into my stomach bag like a bowling ball.
Then I cough her kiss away from me. Push her back like she just took a shit in my mouth and hack up the bad taste.
I dip my face over the bedside to puke up the snot ball, but nothing comes out. It resists. I turn to the blue woman to see her face, wondering what she did to me. Was it some accident that she’d be sorry and disgusted for?
But she just smiles and grabs my stomach for a caress.
Her touch burns cold.
I forgive my blue woman once the taste leaves my mouth. I must. She is something I cannot stay mad at. Besides, without her my world would be blunt-somber, perhaps nothing.
I stagger from my room, slight hunger. Into the meaty wreckage, swirl-whirling me into dizziness, tornadoing red.
An arm hangs from Fria like an offering, and her companion’s disfigurements received body chunks as well.
The storm and madness are still fill-screaming the streets outside. People are babbling crazy and beating and killing each other. Some rain-pounds fall through the roofless section of the warehouse, almost a Hell carnival outside.
My feet stick to the floor, and my eyes dizzy-roll as usual, as they walk to the toilet, pass a few sleep-dying corpses in the corner. Not too many homeless ones in the warehouse today, just a few. The rest must’ve been sickened away. I guess there’s not much point in them staying; half of the roof is missing along with the entire front wall; not much shelter for anyone here. If there was another place to go, I would’ve left too.
I piss in a corner, too weak to move the sculpture gore. It burns, and I like it…
When I turn around, the blue woman is there; she has been behind me for the whole piss. An inch away, watching me go to the bathroom. She’s not sleeping like she usually does at this time, like all blue women do for entertainment, like I figured she was doing now.
She has the same happy look on her face that she had when I awoke, issuing love emotions from her blue skin that sink acidly into mine. I grab her around the back and pull her closer. As I caress her buttock-mounds, she caresses my stomach.
Vodka groans from his toilet seat, trying to push his way out of the sculpture-fortress. He crawls out with palms flaky with dried blood-film. The blood isn’t his. It came from the wounds of skinheads/crazies. Coughs take turns burst-popping from his lungs.
He sits and lights an old cigarette, sitting next to the corpse of John — the weird old guy that lived in back of the warehouse. John isn’t completely dead, as everycorpse else in the room, just sleeping without a heartbeat. Vodka uses the perverted man’s back as an ashtray, spitting shhh -dust all over him. Vodka always loved his smoking. But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying the smoke now, even when defacing a half-dead man’s back.
“Where’s the portal?” Vodka asks me. The tone is unfamiliar. A normal tone — not a fake German accent.
I look around the room for the portal, but it’s gone.
When my mind goes back to my girl, I feel a sharp pain of perception. It creeps up on me and swims through her
skin into my mind.
Looking into the blue woman’s eyes, I figure her all out. I see all of the plans she has for me and know that I’m not just sex-food for her. I feel that emotional-telepathy the blue women have. And my mind snaps with a greenish-red color, the color of unbelief, mistrust.
Her eyes glitter into me, guided by icy fingers to my stomach.
Her telepathy-emotions tell me: You are pregnant.
She had shot her cum ball into my gut — tongue-kissing gave her an orgasm — and now a baby blue woman is squirming in me.
She smiles, proud of herself.
I start thinking. Seriously. Men can be the only creatures to spit cum into someone else. I come to the conclusion that blue women are actually men with breasts and vaginas.
So. I must be gay.
With the rage of homophobia — a phobia that’s very strong in me because I was never exposed to homosexuality during my younger years, and it is yellowish-gray in color. Blaming the blue woman for turning me into a pregnant homosexual — as if I didn’t have enough problems — my fists decide to break her face.
She doesn’t swell or bleed from the punches. She doesn’t seem shocked at me either. But she does fall down into a comfortable sleep, curled up in a red film. Some of my knuckles go fat. They darken around the edges and say, “Why’d you do that for? You don’t know how to hit anybody.”
“Why’d you do that for?” Vodka asks from another side of the warehouse.
I grip my swelling parts. “She turned me into a pregnant faggot.”
“A pedophile, too,” he adds.
Sighing, looking down at her/his sleeping body. And even though I hate homosexuality, I still find her/him amazingly attractive. Which means I’m in the middle of a sexual identity crisis.
“Fucking bitch,” I tell her/him for putting me in this situation. “I’m getting an abortion.”
Of course, I’m kidding myself. She/he has me now. I’m the wife of a four-year-old blue woman and there’s no getting out of it, because she’s an absolute beauty — even if she is male — and I’m slave-weak to her.
“Go back to being a street whore,” I tell her.
Then I carry her into my room, into my bed.
Suddenly I realize something else:
My God’s Eyes have ran away from me.
I can’t see in the third person anymore.
I panic, sick.
A whirl of gin-dust heat pours over me. The only sight left is the crippled one, drug-damaged. It makes me frenzied and ill.
The power left me the second I tried to look into Satan Burger.
It has to be the storm that cut out my vision, cut out my vision like it cuts out electricity. Or maybe it was God. Maybe God stopped feeling sorry for me and wants me to use my normal sight. Or maybe something happened at Satan Burger that I’m not allowed to see.
“There must be something wrong,” I croak at Vodka. “At Satan Burger, I mean. The portal wouldn’t be down like this.”
“It’s just because of the storm,” he answers, cigarette calm.
“The Crazies probably got in and ripped apart Satan Burger, like they did to the warehouse.”
“Nothing’s wrong. You’re being paranoid,” he says.
“I’d be lucky if paranoia is the only thing I’m being.” I hear my words freaking, silly-going. ” Everything’s wrong. Let’s go to Satan Burger.”
“I don’t want to go to Satan Burger,” he whines. At least he can still whine.
“You don’t have a choice. It’s the end of the world.”
“We’re not going anywhere, not with the streets clogged up like they are.”
“We might as well try,” I argue. “Unless you want to become one of these living corpses on the ground.”
He says, “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”
Scene 19
Streets Raging
I convert Vodka to get himself up and going, trip-boring into the car. The old lightning Gremlin starting up a whir, with a good collection of gas still in its gut.
A puddle-mud row is the closest thing to use for a street; we spark-scrape over curbs to get there. People and debris and handmade shelters — cheap patchwork or plastic tents, boxes, piled up scraps — clutter all other areas; even the carpeting on the sidewalks are not accessible. The rain seems to be black-yellow in color, I stare up at it in the sky. Mud water splashes under the wheels, greasing up the windshield.
The street is furious. The rain is sinister and the ill-fighting people are all coated with blankets or trash and plastics over their tops, trying to stop the cold and the plague-rain. The rain’s consistency candywrap the street people, melting them it seems, leaking over their eyes and faces to make them blank or inflamed or uncontrollably nervous.
We find an empty spot in the street and take the opportunity to merge. We plunge into the ocean of people, surrounded by Crazies zombie-walking in circles, all trapped inside of their minds — their own little terrors.
The driving is slow.
Vodka travels with caution. I’m not sure if he’s afraid of the Crazies or just too bored/lazy to use force. The street people soon crowd us into small sections of off-street. Then it gets too thick to make through at all. The Gremlin comes to a snarling halt and I shiver-cough.
A boy without hands crosses and Vod decides to drift from consciousness. He flows outside of reality into his go-away place.
I tell Vodka, “Just run through them. Force ‘em out of the way.”
The Gremlin finds its fashion through without hurting anyone, not terribly at least, just toughguy shovings. A woman spits on the car for touching her. The spit might be blood or vomit. Vodka frowns at her. She glances at me as she spits again, a dead stare, almost a doll-face looking at me. Her eyes don’t seem to be inside of the sockets anymore — I see two yellow eyeholes screaming at me. Her face wrinkles in and around and dissolves. A good many Crazies give me the same horror-melting look, all soggy with yellow gleams. Paranoia washes over me. The sick rain seeps into my skull. Some of the devils punch and kick the car. Bleed-slashing claws attack and splatter against the metal. The autocar drips blood.
Vodka doesn’t seem to care. He continues to drive as if the traffic is normal.
A small tribe of microwave ants crawl on my arms — not certain whether they’re real or just a rolling vision. It’s getting unbearable to be alive without my God’s Eyes. Can’t escape the uneasiness. Maybe I’ll get them back after the storm. Hopefully, praying…
I’ll be praying for a real death otherwise.
“This is going to take forever,” I tell Vodka.
“I told you,” he says.
Vodka’s voice is too foreignto me; he sounds like another person completely. I can’t tell whether he’s still himself or somebody new. Maybe this is the real Vodka, Gin’s brother, the way he was before he started pretending. Maybe his soul is so far out of him that he doesn’t care to pretend. He says, “Oh, well,” more than occasionally.
“I’m going through them,” he says. “I’m sick of waiting.”
At least he is sick of something.
“Finally,” I say.
“What do you mean, finally ?”
“You’ve been driving like a scared old lady.”
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Who cares about hurting them? Go ahead and kill them, nobody dies anymore.”
The car hits its power chords, Vodka’s foot full on the gas. The engine fart-rumbles and we go faster, beating our way through the Crazies that scatter in an ant-frenzy.
Only one person goes under the wheels, lifting the car upward on my side, and I feel a little pain for that person, but it soon passes. It’s more important to get to Satan Burger right now. Much more important than worrying about millions of crazy street people that can’t be killed. If people could die, the population problem would be easily solved.
Speed builds. We’re still moving slow but at least we feel like we’re driving now
instead of slim-rolling. The crowd seems cautious of us up ahead. They bowl out of the way easily enough, gleam-yellow eyes on all of them as we go. The population seems smaller too. And for litter in the gutter, we have human corpses too soulless to ever get up again.
I don’t notice — because of my rolling vision — what race of people we have gotten into until I see them coming out of the sewers and shadow-corners.
The dark ones.
All pale features, mostly naked, more reptilian than I heard — tough skin, lizard-sharp faces, snake eyes — we see a male stamper to our car. Evil white eyes. I can tell it’s a male because he has long pale hair and is veiny with muscles.
My eyes skip a beat.
And then I see that we’ve been thrown into a reel-violent situation, flee-flying out of the scene. Vodka jammed the gas, maybe out of fear, as the dark male approached us. We just crushed his ribs underneath the Gremlin wheels.
And the lightning Gremlin breaks some legs underneath the wheels, curling through Crazies, and a few dark ones are chasing after us — two females and one male. Looking back: a thrash-tatter of movement ripping through the crowd. Our vehicle is the wind. It splits open the air and through the street people…
The crowd is thicker up ahead. The Gremlin accelerates, hoping… Vodka gnashes his teeth, squeezes his eyes, locks his joints. I watch the dark ones fall further and further behind us…
The car beats into the ruff ahead, popping. Some of it over the hood and knocking some of the Gremlin’s life out of it. But we don’t stop… and then we do stop. The Crazies’ faces shriek at our lack of motion…
Satan Burger Page 17