Twilight's Last Gleaming

by Hertzen Chimera

  A bright cadmium yellow explosion lit up Stephanie's face for a second.

  “What did I just say?” she asked.

  “The quick brown fox lays into the jumping dog ... or something.” I sheltered from a hail of living, squealing shrapnel.

  “Close enough. Look, we're gonna have to get away from here.. we're too out in the open.”

  Down through this megacity, dusk and festering cabbage-stinking bowels Stephanie Sylverre and I fumbled. Well, I fumbled. Stephanie, skipping over debris and dead bodies, sidestepped puddles of revolting effluent and ducked her head below overhanging slum architecture like a real native. I FUCKed and DAMNed at my jester's attempt to keep up with her. She disappeared round a corner. Which corner?

  “BOO!” she jumped me, rugby-tackling me into a mound of cardboard refuse.

  As far as I could make out, two or three or maybe four low-life-forms had made their home in the dump and we had spectacularly annihilated their slumber. The rudely awoken low-life-forms, all of the same lamb-snake subgenre, made a deafening siren sound and skittered off to quieter lodgings, scattering boxes and other alien refuse in their infuriated wake.

  “Grouches.” Stephanie shouted after the fleeing aliens, her anorexic grip as tight as ever round my waist. Her boy-horse face wide with delight.

  “Scared them off.” she beamed. Then she kissed me, on my throat; just snuggled in, tightening her embrace on me. I gasped for breath as she squeezed; a residual trace of greasepaint set my heart thumping.

  “Want fucky-fucky?” she offered.

  Why is this always happening lately? No sex for like 25 years. Not one genital sniff. Not one taste of fresh flesh; neither breast nor bollock. Not one furtive fumble in the dank heat of a one-night-stand's filthy period knickers. No beaver-shot memorabilia to jerk off to in my mind's abandoned eye. No memory of the pain and pleasure of sadomasochistic copulation. No gender bending. No sensation. No communal ring cycle of spattered jism on the Weekend News Journal. Then, all of a sudden, anything man; woman; child; alien; hermaphrodite, alien; alien; alien; even old cunt's like Arrenay.

  The sad memory of that poor woman and the courageous sacrifice she made to allow our escape turned me right off the idea of salacious Stephanie’s up-front invitation. But she already had my one-piece-black-latex-body-suit open to the navel. And she was busy tickling my annoyingly-masculine hairy chest and tummy, my sinewy pecs and abdominals, with her patent-black triangular talons. Cooing in an alien back-throat way and beginning to get very hot.

  Bodily hot; her temperature shooting right up into the critical.

  A molten heartbeat surging against my untempered flesh like a hammer at the anvil. Slamming hotter and hotter, the metronomic percussion of a blast furnace. Beads of ink-marbled sweat formed on her horse-child's face and streamed down into the fine trimming adorning the neck of her black velvet half-cut-away top, the delicately crafted collar drooping with the sheer volume of perspiration. This bitch was roasting. Burning up. She pressed her boy-girl genitalia into my rock-hard thigh.

  “Don't.” I pushed her away, she stumbled and landed on her arse in the dust and faeces of this back alley, her ankles in the air.

  Stephanie and I haven't spoken for a good hour, since I declined her sexual favour in the refuse heap; such class, eh?

  “Chinatown.” I thought I heard her exclaim. She scowled at me as if I shouldn't even be bothering to tag along with her. Why AM I bothering to tag along with her? I'm supposed to find this CUT fella and get him to decipher these zvektas of Mr Whysilage, aren't I? Am I seeing the Big Picture? Is there any point?

  “Chinatown.” her spirits brightened instantaneously, “Come.” she proffered an effeminate hand. I took it. She pulled me close and wrapped a spidery arm round my waist, “You'll enjoy Chinatown, I promise.”

  She was right; in a way.

  This sordid neon-lit prostitute-laden 'toilet' did indeed look like Chinatown. Like the Chinatown you'd find in any big city an Earth. Just like Hong Kong, in fact. Then it struck me that the language on the neon signs, wasn't exactly Chinese, more like Arrowspeak; a series of vertical sticks with a number of down or up arrow signs adjacent to horizontal arrows pointing, left and right. A language with which you can really tell someone where to go ... and give them directions.

  The neon signs weren't real neon either.

  The messages themselves were made up of living words, whole families of calligraphymorphs that writhed and split and rearranged themselves into a new, luminous slander every advertising minute or so. Weird to see the whole highstreet in chameleon synchrony go through the leopard changing it's spots trick. A ballet of gibberish with phosphorescence the camp choreographer.

  Neither were the prostitutes real hookers. They were, Stephanie was all too pleased to show me by stuffing her forearm deep into the vagina of one nonchalant, scantily-clad reptilian beauty, solid holograms would be one way to describe them, like living jelly that could alter its molecular friction dependant upon biogenetic access codes of the client. Living advertisements designed to give you a taste of the real meat you simply had to dial down.

  “Dial down?” I was beginning to sound like a fucking parrot.

  “Yes,” she replied to me as if to an imbecile, her telephone hand to her ear. “Dial It Down. You know; telephone?”

  “Where?”

  “You don't need that synthetic tripe when you can have me for free.” the seductress sidled up to me, her crotch to mine; prodded in. I smiled politely. She smacked me in the face; full in the face with her daintily-knuckled fist.

  “Now look what you've made me do.” she reddened.

  I put a hand to my nose to staunch the flow of blood.

  “Here,” Stephanie handed me a triangle of black velvet torn from her ever-diminishing top.

  “Dthangz.” I blubbed.

  “Wanna play some games?” she skipped off.

  Guess I've just gotta follow her. I am a masochist. “I AM A MASOCHIST.” I called after her, giving chase.

  “Greetings Edgaremmaline.” Stephanie acknowledged the round stall owner of an absolutely immense brightly-illuminated deafeningly-soundtracked funfair we staggered into round the first corner. All seven senses carpetbombed.

  “Woah, here she is!” the pear-shaped stall holder, like a butcher in his clear-plastic smock, began in theatrical bass monotone, his slack jowls and neck blubber vibrating with the sonorous boom of his voice.

  “Our favourite customer. Payer of our rent! Feeder of our children. Lone star in a sky of winners.”

  “Handbrake turn, Ed.” Stephanie retorted, “Gimme ‘the machinery’.”

  “On the slate?” Edgaremmaline's voice gained an octave and a half of altitude in a rictus of high bronchial coughs; the guy’s bulbous form tightened around his skeleton, just sucked right down to the muscle and sinew; the face fell gaunt like a mummy’s; the eyes rolled from black to cobalt blue; a surgical scar formed down the whole of his face from a hairline growing long and luscious auburn from a patchy Brylcreem yellow to a neck whose floppy obesity has snapped elastic to the sinews and jugulars of a Joan Collins look-alike; all facial make-up and pert breasts integral to the cosmetically repacked façade, “I don’t think so, eh, loser!?!”

  “Emmalinedgar.” Stephanie held out her arms to an old friend.

  “Fuck the false bon-homie, bitch. It's hard cash’ll give me good memories of you,” she was not taking the social bait.

  “Fair's fare!” Stephanie took a handful of hexagonal chips from a pocket and tossed them at the feet of Emmalinedgar.

  The fat male Edgaremmaline rose with great physical effort from picking up the chips, “You know you're welcome here; anytime; anyday, Steph.”

  “The machinery.” Stephanie beckoned with agitated fingers.

  “It’s yours, baby.” Edgaremmaline roared above the fairground chunter, handing over a heavy-gauge fully-automatic double-barrel firearm gleaming purest enamel white.

  “Rack 'em up.”
she settled the tooth-crown coloured monster into her hip.

  “Ready?” Edgaremmaline boomed.

  “Ready.” Stephanie screamed, “Pull!”

  At the flick of a switch, a fine mesh cage dropped down. A hundred (guess) bright yellow chaffinches set free inside the cage flapped and fluttered madly. A brilliantly criss-crossing hypnotic flourish of golden panic; sunflowers thrown about by a hurricane.

  The wounds inflicted on those tiny beauties; the beakless ones; the eyeless ones; the clawless ones; the ripped-tail-feathered ones blaze bright sepia as the bullets spat from the hardware lodged into Stephanie's hip. Her war-shriek like a Folie-Berger dancer as her skinny body juddered. The grimace of her face a spatter of sepia Morse Code dots and dashes. There was a pattern in there beyond resolution.

  Edgaremmaline, nearest the cage as the shrapnel rattled the wire mesh deflecting an accurate line of fire, was caked in the stuff.. The reason for the clear-plastic butcher’s smock now all too nauseatingly apparent.

  “Go on, my beauties!” Edgaremmaline cheered on his flock as they dashed themselves against the mesh and dropped to the shit-lined floor of the cage.

  “Missed one!” Emmalinedgar cried, her wiry smile bright and wide, “Missed one, missed one.”

  Stephanie eases her finger off the trigger.

  Several barely living chaffinches continue their madly flapping dash, slamming off the wire walls of their cage and dropping drunkenly to the shit-and-blood-and- chaffinch-corpse-strewn floor of the cage. Their tiny ribs expanding and contracting with unbelievable rapidity on adrenalin overdrive until they expired.

  My ears were missing. I saw mouths move long before the words arrived. Then they came; all scrambling over each other in the few remaining seconds of the spasmodically shape-changing stall holder's miserable life.

  “Stephanie, don't be foolish!” Edgaremmaline pleaded as the gun was directed at his fat, round gut.

  “Why not?” Stephanie asked, still panting from her murderous exertions.

  “Free subscription.” Edgaremmaline burped indignantly.

  “Free life subscriptions.” Emmalinedgar, his alter-ego-morph offered, “For you and your – pet.”

  “A bribe.” Stephanie sneered with disgust, “All’s I want is a fair deal…” she suddenly got hiccups. Couldn’t stem them no matter how hard she gulped. Looked almost human there, gun rammed into her hip, hiccupping like a girl.

  “Anything.” the stallholder as Emmalinedgar pleaded.

  “Anything.” her rotund pseudo-morph agreed.

  Stephanie pointed to a small metallic object that looks like a portable dentist's drill, battery powered; hand held.

  “It’s yours!” Edgaremmaline handed over the toy.

  A throng of alien revellers brushed boisterously by me, taking no notice of the hold-up.

  “What nice toys you have…” Stephanie turned the thing in her hand.

  The gun, still pressed into her hip, went off, unleashing the remaining ammo, slicing Edgaremmaline diagonally across his blubbery midriff. His upper body in its deaththroes flipped from the fat husband to the skinny wife in consternation, each face as aghast as the previous and the following. Then the marriage was over, nullified by the divorce of its vital organs. The nauseous stench of their internal workings hung about their dismal stall long after we departed.

  “Never did like the two-faced bastard.” Stephanie tossed the empty gun onto the split remains of the stall holder. One single yellow chaffinch flapped about in the cage, completely unscathed, unmarked by the shower of bullets, above the avian mortuary below.

  “Pretty symbolic that, don't you think?” Stephanie was obviously from another planet entirely. She led me off to another weird part of this weird fairground of this weird planet.

  “D.J.!” she barked in my ear, shocking me from my reverie.

  “Yes?” I frowned.

  “Are you with us?”

  Shell shock; must be shell shock.. witnessing so much motiveless slaughter after a life of monotonous hermitude has taken its toll on my fickle well-being. I am losing it.

  “D.J..” she snapped at me like I was a sulking child, “It's only a bit of fun.” she held out her stick-insect arms, “You're supposed to enjoy yourself at the fair, aren't you?”

  She skipped off; a little girl with a boy-horse face flashing her double-cream arse with each jolly bound.

  SEVENTEEN

  Oliver Connecticut sat naked in a pair of fishnet tights and a white sports bra. In front of him on the floor a sodden pile of training clothes he had just stripped from his sweaty body. The TV was on in the corner. A video was playing - ROBOCOP.

  Oliver's eyes were glazed over with befuddled fascination at the mindless mayhem on the screen. His left hand idly pulled the foreskin back and forth as it peeped through the netting. The filthy sex-member kept semi-hard; just nice for squidging into tight slippery pussies. Not so hard as to give him a sense of total control... just the right weight of meat to let some dumb bitch fairground-crane her slit carp over and shimmy down, sending his Bratwurst to a boiling erection.

  “Right!” he suddenly called out to no-one in particular.

  ROBO COP entered the drug barren’s production warehouse and yet another gun battle ensued. Behind Oliver Connecticut, his bedroom door opened. So mesmerised was he by the cinematic revelry that he didn't hear Lily Veyne step round him until she had turned off the TV. She was whistling a familiar tune; a faithful facsimile of the music they played at the White House the night they had a Lads Only Nite. Then he fucking saw her in all her gory shreds.

  Stood before him in his room while he still believed his fat mam snored and his buck toothed sister fingered herself in rooms nearby, illuminated only by the small bedside lamp on the far side of the bedroom.

  Lily Veyne, naked.

  Her rich plump form painted a golden hue by the paltry illumination from the table lamp; a succulent structure. Wide rolling mounds of body fat. Congealed globular masses of erogenous orange flesh; her sensuality, it seemed, enhancing her body's subtle tinge.

  Lily Veyne dipped into the pile of steaming clothes between them. Selected a drenched sports sock. Pulls it onto her own dainty footsy.

  Oliver Connecticut's cock leapt a mile into the air, his hips rising like a man in the chair. Lights dimming all over the town.

  Lily Veyne smiled. Again the random selection. A pair of damp tracksuit bottoms.

  Lily Veyne pulled these on super-slowly – you could actually hear the shiny synthetic fabric twanging her unshaven leghairs. One by one by one… Oliver Connecticut groaned out loud. The pain in his cock matched by the pulse of his balls.

  Lily Veyne beamed, this time selecting the pair of filthy Y-fronts. Oliver Connecticut’s eyes were begging her not to do it. She pulled these on OVER the tracksuit bottoms, just like Super Man. Oliver Connecticut gasped camply, tossing his thick head back.

  Lily Veyne laughed out loud, finding her muse, selected ... another sock. She showed the stinking, rancid thing to him, the national anthem whistled afresh.

  “No.” he shook his head, terror literally scratching itself all over his face with hooks from deep under the sea.

  “No?” Lily inserted her fist into the damp sock and started rolling it round her wrist.

  “No!” Oliver Connecticut really panicked now by the ferocious potential of his rumbling genitals. The mean mother-fuckers gnashing and snarling to be free of his groin. Like nasty old dogs they had the sight of blood and were ready to tear out throats.

  “NO!!!” he howled as Lily Veyne rolled the suppurant sock down her pretty, soft hand. The symbolism too much for the panting punter. He grunted and shuddered as the thing, his manhood's representative, launches itself into life.

  It grew as if from within. A longer, wider more lethal member growing from the fertiliser of his missable penile meat. A hideously distorted head popped up through the foreskin. The head actually had a face that looked right at its daddy. Oliver Connecticut
’s horror intensified tenfold.

  Lily Veyne, still whistled the stripper's tune, pulled on the sweatshirt; inside out. Too much. The cock stretched like a demon's screaming face. Swelling and rising - an incensed anaconda growing with an eager flowing of throttling scales till it stood head-to-head with its seated progenitor. Oliver Connecticut gulped and reached for the throat of the abomination; his hands sliding off its shiny, slick head as it writhes and pulses for release. Each electric slip causing it to twitch and toss higher and harder. Grinning insanely, Lily Veyne picked up the tracksuit top. Slipped it on and, with meticulous care, slowly pulled up the zipper. The plastic sound of zipper against teeth a nightmare.

  Oliver Connecticut wrestled the uncontrollable mushroom-headed veiny monster as it tried to bite his fucking head off. At the furtive climax to the titanic struggle its head vomited up a sickly concoction of spunk and blood and urine into his red face.

  Lily Veyne lay back on Oliver Connecticut's single bed as the last grotesque twitches of the cock spluttered and burped demise. The entire thing went pitifully limp, hanging slackly over its strangulation.

  Oliver Connecticut opened his eyes; two dark patches in a creamy facepack. His mouth, a third dark patch forming a triangle, breathed exhaustion

  “Oliver.” Lily Veyne parted her legs as she sprawled on his bed.

  “How well it fits.” he splutters spunkily. Tried to crawl over to her but his limp cock, like a dead dog's tail, got in the way and he puts his knee on it. Screamed with sudden excruciating pain. Lily Veyne would also scream - if only the constriction of bedclothes tightening about her throat would let her.

  It is time to come clean about Clive Idaho’s enraged claim of knowing exactly where he’d find the object of his vengeance, this Lily Veyne. Clive Idaho, in fact, hadn't the foggiest idea where to even start looking for his NEMESIS. It had taken him all of the night and most of the morning to track her to here, not knowing Ollie's last name and he was well knackered from the search. But here he was now; fuelled by his grisliness and armed with his new abilities the bed began to swallow her whole, the continental quilt throttling her pretty throat.