Twilight's Last Gleaming

by Hertzen Chimera

  “You can shout all you want, my lovely.” I shrugged, “The spirit may be willing but the body...” I take the limp cock in thumb and fore-finger, “..is droopy.”

  “Mmmm.” she pouted, “Should have remembered the last one of you I had. She pointed to the ceiling; top right. There's the sweet man. Burt. Found him dying of starvation in a rat-infested barn in a village just north of here by about, oh ... two hundred of your light-years. He fucked once an hour as well. Still, can't have everything as we’d like it.”

  I actually did manage another quick one; beating out a gasping rhythm into the ancient Arrenay. Her genital ministrations of my new manhood (ha, such a mature word; man-hood) sucked into new life; a practice perfected through her millennia. A tingling transfusion of hot blood vacuumed from me to feed the new fuck matter. Cajole the cock to a new height; an improved extension; a stronger throb.

  Oh yeah, she wasn't messing around, this white-haired saggy-breasted millennia-straddling mama; really fucked me over; rode me until my balls bled; her powers of stamina a sheer example to all you unfit bastards gasping through the daily (weekly?) sexual ritual in a half-hearted can't-get-my-breath and anyway-as-long-as-l-come-that's-all-that--matters-isn’t-it lung-aching back-buckled-slouch-over-the-wife sort of shagging fashion. Yeah, really fucked me over, she did.

  “So, what's my husbands true name?” Arreney asked me as we strolled arm-in-arm down the white-gravel path from the back door of her mansion to her transporter situated at the end of a lush, bronze pasture.

  Ankle-high stroke weed (stroke weed being my word for the weird vegetation as this describes both the grass’s tattered leaf formation and its action underfoot) blessed every step. I don't actually know if my feet are touching the floor as we approach her vehicle. Can't be bothered to check.

  “Deniz.” I said without thinking.

  Arrenay whooped out loud.

  “What?”

  “You did it!”

  “Did what?” realised I'd remembered, “Oh, yeah; just popped into my head.”

  “Already the body is remembering its old self, Deniz. It's about time we found out about these zvektas.”

  She handed me the canary-yellow sunspecs.

  Stuffing them into a breast pocket, I took my place by the passenger-side door. Gull wings groaned hydraulically into the air; thick veins in the doors pumping elevation, “Hop in.” she ordered, then cushioned the military with, “...husband.”

  Into the moist interior of the vehicle I climbed. The body-suit Arrenay had furnished my new body with adequate cover so that the odd secretion from the living transporter's muttering ceiling into my new ebony hair was the only minor annoyance in this snug abode. If you were wondering about the body-suit, it's black latex; yes, BLACK, and very sexy-looking too; the shiny vinyl surface describing the taught contours of my new physique. Ha, such a smug bastard.

  “There's a vigot I know should be able to decipher the information in the zvektas. Lives Downline.” Arreney intoned as she played with the three globes of red, amber, green light that transcribed the car's drive and ignition system. Flipped her hand sharply through the red plasma ball, trailing its scarlet threads into the amber. Ignition.

  “Vigot? Did you say Vigot?” I asked.

  “Vigot, yes, that's a term for ... oh, how should I put it? A transputationalist? Geometric linguist. His name is CUT.”

  “CUT? Where had I heard CUT before?”

  “Yes, CUT’s our man. These zvektas could be the breakthrough our cause has been waiting for. How we've struggled recently with the ever-present threat of Dropouts.” she waved her left hand through the green ball of light in an anticlockwise direction.

  The car's rear end lifted, inclining us at angle of thirty degrees.

  The lush ground in front of the car opened up like a throat; lit with receding lines of fluorescent peach. She made a clapping action which drew strands from green and red into the central amber orb and the car dropped like a dead weight into the pastel abyss.

  After a few breathless moments of blind panic when down was up and left was right and the g-force capability of my new body was pushed to black-out limits (Arrenay frowning perplexed at my obscure panting) we slammed into a whirling deviation of the fluorescent peach. Out onto the New York freeway.

  “New York!” I gasped, looking around and squinting through the polarized crystal of the vehicle's transparent areas at the tower blocks stretching into the copper sky.

  “What?!” Arrenay giggled, as if I'd just inadvertently let out some rude sound.

  “New York!” I said the place name again.

  Again Arrenay laughed; fuller, more amused on the second hearing.

  “What?!” I demanded.

  “You can't go around talking like that,” she turned the car off our present lane into a long slow right-hander which passed under the freeway we’d just left and proceeds.

  DOWNLINE - the street-sign said in Randalese, Arrenay assured me.

  “Listen.” she recaptured her line of spiel, “New-York.” she touched her chin, cheek then temple as she uttered the chuckle-laden word, “..is a slang term. It's gutter speak. It's also a criminal offence. Anyone hears you say that word you could be dead ... again. New-York,” she repeated the action as she said the word again, “No, no, no. Don't ever use that term. If you want to call this sky-scraping dump anything call It by its official term UPLINE; it's lots safer. I assure you.”

  Again she allowed herself a small chuckle at the almost catastrophic faux-pas I'd made. Oh, the sheer complexities of a New World culture.

  As we changed lanes to avoid a crash up ahead (nothing ever stops on these Upline Freeways, not even the gore-seekers slow down to ogle the mangled wreckage such is Upline's bad reputation and Nomadix infestation) something caught Arrenay's eye.

  “Stephanie.”

  She slammed her hand into the amber globe, fingers wide distorting the sphere to a quarter-arc of vortices. The car came to a swift halt. My door popped open

  “Stephanie.” Arreney called to a fleeing figure as it sailed gracefully by in its fishnet-leg-length stride, “Gyig Nufa!” Arrenay shouted.

  The stranger - a lipless boy’s face stretched over a horse's head - looked about frantically, recognised Arrenay's car, then the driver and dove headfirst in under the gullwing.

  Right into me.

  The door clunked softly shut and we were away again at speed. Stephanie and myself were all tangled up in each other. She GVEKed and SPAAKTINGed and some other sounds I didn't quite catch until she untangled herself from me and tried to scramble to the dark recess of the car's rear end.

  But her long black hair got caught in the collar-catch of my black latex body-suit.

  “Mengst!” she squealed, tugging at her hair to free it. It came loose. The wig came clean off, leaving Stephanie with a sweat-shining scalp and a scattering of symbolically symmetrical ginger hair tufts; above the ears; over the crown, both sides of the back of her giraffe neck. wispy straggles of this mane licked her forehead, caked with sweat.

  “Gibz! Gibz!” she whinnied like a fucking horse in heat

  “Stephanie, mug di bu zetz?” Arrenay asked.

  “Nomadix.” a startled neigh.

  “Nomadix!?”

  I recognise this word.

  “Arreni, dub a ti Ywa zgan.” Stephanie narrowed her eyes at me.

  “She says you have a foreign accent, stranger.” Arrenay swerved to avoid a pedestrian who had wandered blindly from the scene of yet another crash. Green blood disfiguring it all down one side.

  “Gi fa’h?” Stephanie asked me.

  “D.J.” I answered.

  “Good guess.” Arrenay congratulated me, “Unfortunately, she wants to know your regiment.”

  “My regiment?”

  I shook my head at Stephanie and scowled and pouted; all at the same time. Stephanie lunged for my throat with her feminine hands. Instinctively, like a she-lion protecting her cubs from their fathers cruel paw, Ar
renay pulled hard right on the car's plasma controls, throwing Stephanie’s attack wide of her mark and trapping her down the back of my sodden seat. Her hands clawing at the leather-like upholstery. The vehicle bucking and swaying violently from one side of the freeway to the other.

  Cars behind us collided in a nuclear blast of green light.

  Arrenay was screaming at Stephanie, “Ib nig dwa! Ib nig dwa! Begetzkatal! Sub du twa ni jenzal!”

  “Vig dez!” Stephanie scrambled free.

  Reseated herself in the back of the car, snorting in her crazy equine way.

  “She can't apologise.” Arrenay told me, “You should know at least this.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said nothing, you simply made an apologetic gesture; quite an insult. People have been killed for less.” I turn to the still-scowling Stephanie and poked my tongue at her; she seemed to understand and returned the gesture with a child's mischievous smile.

  “Stephanie, nu dwib ju gi fe’k nib Nomadix?” Arrenay asked.

  “Nib at nig du dweed.”

  “Four of them, as always.” Arrenay informed me, “Dressed like Pierrots this time. The Pierrots are the most cunning of the Upline Nomadix. Stephanie carries strong sepium about her.”

  “Gib a fek ju nasta te-t.” Stephanie seemed to swear.

  “Sepium?” I quizzed yet another new term.

  “A Nomadix colour.” Arrenay began, “As Mr Whysilage probably told you, a Nomadix will adapt the form of its prey. A form of social camouflage. That's what makes them so lethal. But frequently their terrible dress sense gives them away. Xib a dwik tja?” Arrenay teased Stephanie over her shoulder.

  “Dit to!” Stephanie retorted, “Nob nik jut ju to-i.”

  “Yib nya no, D.J., ti kanataka.”

  “Gub djig wi Yak, D.J.?” Stephanie tittered, “Yib, D.J., gmi lu tivi dja.”

  “Zmigta.”

  “Va ka la lo.”

  “Kissura.” Stephanie pouted at me.

  Stephanie finds your fake maleness quite comical. Arennay cute - as she puts it.

  “Arennay cute?” I ask the dark stranger.

  “Sub dua.” Stephanie smiled with her percheron eyes.

  “Is this a good sign?” I asked Arreney.

  “She likes you. You remind her of the man she used to be. Rampant romantic that he was.”

  “Neb ik dya nu sub dwa, ega, Stephanie?”

  Stephanie folded her thin white arms round her small breasts: drew her knees into the caress. I notice the ‘girl’ wasn't wearing underwear, the snailish remnant of her former masculinity bordering her woman's pudenda like a coiled grass-snake around her tiny clutch of eggs. A white hairless complex of folds and creases in the blanched flesh of her scrotum; a scentless virgin spadix anticipating some salacious parasitic wormy infestation. Dry through neglect; chapped chiffon wrapped in papyrus scrawled with the lude rantings of a nymphomaniac's fugue.

  All that from the brief whitelight mindframe.

  An intentional display, I'm sure.

  “What was her old name?” I asked Arrenay.

  “Jib kwa?” Arrenay asked her,

  “Oliver Shelley.” she tittered to me.

  “Nice name.” I told the hermaphrodite.

  “Mmah gib jva nik Stephanie Sylverre.” she chuckled.

  “Her first lover, a theatrical agent in Romsey Nega, gave her that name...” said Arrenay, “That was just before she blew his brains out with his own gun for peeing inside her one night?”

  Stephanie was nodding all through the tale, getting the gist of what was being said; she made a finger-gun at her right temple and made a KEPAWGH sound. Before nonchalantly blowing the spent fingertips. Arrenay found this most amusing. I'm not so sure but I snuffled a token snucker just 'cos I hate being left out of ANYTHING. Silly, I know.

  SIXTEEN

  Bill Parrish turned his black Ford Sierra RS Turbo into the bottom end of Parsons Walk. Clive Idaho stashed in the padded roof. The Police Bulletin reported of yet another in a lengthening series of screwdriver attacks in the town centre. That would be the third in as many hours. Some sick fuck had been very, very busy. The muscles in his (or her) screwdriving arm would be really aching, burning like it was going to fall off, with the deluge of acid their exertion must be producing. Ten victims in total have felt his blunt wrath since the first - some fat bloke up on Bishopgate - a couple of days ago. Yes, spiking someone with a screwdriver seems a very brutishly macho thing to do. But...

  “Probably a dyke with penis envy.” Bill Parrish philosophised out loud.

  “Next right.” came the muffled instruction from overhead.

  “What next right?” Bill demands, being on a long straight road.

  “No. No. Here! Stop.” Clive Idaho shouted all flustered, “This is the place. Stop the car! Stop the car.”

  Bill slammed on the brakes, slewing the car into an impromptu parking configuration.

  “Be careful.” Bill heard the voice physically distort as Clive Idaho stretched himself from padded fabric to steel. “You've gotta watch this woman, she's very tricky. Don't let her seduce you..”

  “Seduce me? That’d make a right nice change from the norm.”

  “She would do it, too. She knows what men like. I’ve seen her at her work. That's how she does it, too, seducing the ones you'd never suspect. The well camouflaged, the socially hidden...

  “You don't think I've got what it counts in the nooky department?” Bill chastised the ceiling dweller.

  Clive Idaho didn't take the bait, “Just arrest her and her freaky friend. And you'll be in for major promotion. We're talking big commendation here.”

  “I'm getting the pep talk from the ceiling of my squad car.” Bill commented to a depressed-looking man as he clambered out of the Sierra. The man eyed Bill up and down, the way Sylvester the Cat drools over Tweety Bird; his wiry right arm tensed, the veins like fat worms; the fist contracted round some protrusion in the pocket of his brown overcoat; then he walked on his dreary way. Were there blood stains down his right side?

  Bill Parrish knocked on the blistered front door of 13 Parsons Walk. Received no reply from within. Only the sounds of the busy street behind him. The slanderous whispers of fresh air. The conspiracy of rustling leaves. The bullet carving a fatal path towards your head. Detective Bill Parrish looked round ... paranoid as ever.

  “Got to keep on your toes in this line of business.” he muttered non-commitally to a stunted old bag lady shuffling her eternal merry-go-round lap of honour round the estate. The hag showed Bill Parrish the irreparable degeneration of her teeth.

  He knocked again; more forcefully this time. The door clicked open a crack.

  “Hello?” Bill peeped inside the dark hallway. Stepped cautiously over the rotting threshold, “Anyone home?”

  Straight out of the How To Sound As Daft As A Duck With Whooping Cough book of cop one-liners.. Number 495 Subsection (b) – “Anyone home?” It's there in Government Sponsored black & white.

  Bill gasped at breath as the tarnished wallpaper beside him filled with life. “They’re all gone.” Clive Idaho’s voice was a little raspier somehow projected through this rotten medium. Clive Idaho’s face momentarily broke the surface like a memory made flesh.

  “I'll never get used to the way you do that.” Bill had his hand to his heart, “What were you saying?”

  “They're all gone. And the old woman's dead.”

  “What old woman?”

  “His mother. Bed ridden. He was feeding her on the leftovers from his child experiments.”

  “I'm not surprised she's dead.”

  “I don't think it was the food that finished her off. Ever had your guts ripped out and laid beside you by an irate Biriani or a rampant Chicken Tika?”

  “Can't say I have.” said Bill to the wall, “Okay, where is this dead mother?” Bill’s sanity was now well and truly out for a stroll.

  “She's not important.”

  “Oh, but I'm sure
she is.” Bill was adamant, ”I think all the evidence here is going to have to be looked over with the light of ultimate scrutiny, after that charade with cell 9 - don't you think?”

  Unbelievably, the wallpaper seemed to bow its head in acknowledgement, inhale a pattern-warping breath: exhale a tarnishing sigh.

  “I suppose we will have to play it your way.” A statement of resignation from Clive Idaho.

  Bill Parrish shook his head to clear it of all that visual bollocks then wearily ascended the steep and creaking staircase to the old lady's room at the end of the landing. The banister threatening to give, all the way to the top of the stairs.

  “Hurry.” the landing carpet hissed; a wave of tired pattern flowed down the landing and disappeared under the old lady’s door. Bill followed it.

  Inside was a sorry, nauseous scene. Bed covers disrespectfully tossed back. Old woman stripped of her piss-stained nightdress hanging off the far side of the bed, her carbuncled feet tangled in the sweating sheets. Her naked rump sporting bedsores. There was the usual abattoir stench to the place. Always shite; the universally acknowledged scent of death; and the buzzing of flies; how did they get in? How do they know? Are flies born to death like fleas to kittens?

  Banalities.

  Metropolitan Rule 2I9 Subsection (i) - Fill each and every moment with banalities. It tempers the boredom of the job, makes life on the force just whiz by; before you know it, it's time to clock off, get in the squad car, flip on that big blue light, that wailing siren and red-light-it all the way home for tea/breakfast/lunch - depending on your shift.

  “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!”