by Ryan Harding
“I see. And will you throw in my dick at half price if I act now?”
“I didn’t make that call to your wife, although in all fairness to my associates, they thought that the one in their possession came from you. It was an honest mistake that anyone could have made.” Not liking Rochester’s smart-ass method of negotiating, Sammy attempted to get a little rise out of him. “Your wife wasn’t disturbed in the least, by the way.”
“No, she wouldn’t be. It was a different story when she found out I was unharmed.”
It wasn’t the reaction Sammy had hoped for, but he wasn’t exactly surprised. There was more than one way to skin a twat, though, as they said (or at least he did). He made no reply to Rochester and merely held the phone to Angelique’s head. “Talk,” he commanded.
“Eddie, please help! They’ve got all these women down here to torture them and they want me . . . they want me to . . . to smoke with …” Here her convincing plea dissolved into incomprehensible histrionics as panicked sobs overtook her. If he’d draped a paper bag over her head, she probably would have gasped a hole through it.
Sammy removed the phone from her ear and brought it to his own “You still think we’re playing a game, Henny Youngman?”
“No,” Rochester said after a moment of silence.
“Well, you were right the first time; it is a game. Just not the kind your little bitch can afford to lose. Now then, did I get to the point fast enough for you? Welcome to the next level, motherfucker.”
“Has she been hurt?” Finally, some actual concern.
“She broke a bone in transit, but she’ll live to suck another day.”
“I want to think about it.”
“She’s not a used car, Ed. She’s a D-cup brunette with an ass that won’t quit—”
But allegedly would smoke, under the right circumstances, he thought.
“—unless we don’t get our three million dollars. No more glory hole loads down the hatch, at least not from you. There’ll be thousands from us before we put her pretty little ass outta biz, though, you can bet on that. And probably millions more after that.”
A white lie . . . Sammy would have thousands and millions more, yes. Von and Greg would be outta luck and outta biz, though. His basement, his rules.
“So think about that as you mull it over—” Sammy reached for an adequate insult and remembered something Von said earlier. “Fag face. You have twenty minutes.” Sammy ended the call and then turned it off altogether for the time being. It was unlikely anybody would be attempting to triangulate its position so soon, but as Von said, it pays to be careful. It might pay three million dollars.
He turned to relay the news to the dysfunctional duo.
“Shiiiiiiiit,” he said, clenching the phone in his hand hard enough to dislodge the back cover and send it clattering to the concrete.
They were gone.
The instant Sammy’s back was turned, Greg and Von crept up the stairs at Von’s behest. They could find out later what came of the phone call, but this might be the only unescorted chance they got tonight at the attic. Once clear of the basement, Von stealthily eased the door shut and then they were through the kitchen and up the stairs like a shot, all but trampling one another on the last flight. Even now they could hear the faint, strange laughter which had tantalized them throughout the evening.
Sammy’s secret.
“If it’s Slut Necro Lambda’s twin sister, I got dibs on that backdoor,” Greg proclaimed.
“Hell with that,” Von said promptly, elbowing his cohort to all fours. He reached the top of the dim corridor first, although he was prevented from going in when Greg clamped his arms around his legs.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were hugging me,” Von said. “I’m tempted to drop-kick your ass down the stairs anyway. Have you lost your mind? We don’t have much time before Sammy realizes we’re gone.”
Greg reluctantly withdrew and hauled himself to his feet. Von tried the door.
“Locked,” he reported glumly. He stared the door down defiantly. “You son of a whore.”
“Cussin’ it ain’t gonna help,” Greg said.
“Eat a dick,” Von replied absently, then remembered. “Another one, I mean.”
Greg shoved him. “Why don’t you grab you another one through a glory hole?”
Von ignored him. “Question is, do we break it down? He may have a good reason to lock it up. This could turn into a huge problem that we don’t need tonight.”
“But what if he’s only locking it cause it’s his best work and he’s too selfish to share it with us?”
“That would be pretty low of him,” Von concurred, conveniently forgetting about how they never invited Sammy to take a ride on that body they found on the road awhile back or share in any of the spoils of Geisha Hammond, or how they’d had every intention of not only cheating Sammy out of millions of dollars but possibly killing him to have it all to themselves.
“And he could have dead guys stashed all over the house that we don’t know about. What if he stitched ‘em together to create some kind of superman to guard the door if we ever came back?”
“Let’s break it,” Von said immediately. Sammy obviously couldn’t surgically create some kind of superhuman sentinel like Greg was worried about (at least Von didn’t think he could), but he would do something to make it more difficult for anybody to get in now that he knew someone was determined to see inside. It was now or never. Anything too crazy would need a little more than just a door to keep it in place, wouldn’t it? This had to be something too good to share.
They both reared back and kicked above the door knob the way the cops did on TV, managing to do so mostly in synch for the next few attempts. The door finally splintered and swung inward on the fifth try.
Von entered the attic first, feeling for a light switch in the total darkness. There were no windows and no hint of light anywhere. They stumbled in blindly, fully expecting to run into or fall over something. Von flinched when something touched his face, but a moment later he identified it as the chain from an overhead bulb. He yanked it and recoiled when something in the corner of the attic simultaneously shrank back from the light.
“Who are they?” a woman’s voice said.
“Who’s she talking to?” Greg asked, alarmed, looking around.
“She talks to them,” the woman explained.
“She is a few bullets shy of a clip,” Von noted.
She emerged from the darkened corner for a better look at them, squinting into the light like someone emerging from a mine shaft. She propelled herself with her arms, dragging her legs behind her like they were as useless as a mermaid’s fins on dry land.
“What happened to her legs?” Greg asked, as if Von had read her medical file.
“Looks like she was in a fire.”
Von was no doctor, however, so it was no surprise that he confused burn marks with tertiary syphilis. Perhaps there was a vague resemblance. There did appear to be several patches along her hips and thighs where a couple layers of flesh had been scorched away, and in some instances they looked to have decomposed to stages of adipocere. They resembled fatty deposits of custard which had crusted in mounds to her skin. Von suddenly found himself thinking of a cheese pizza he’d heated in an oven for way too long.
Her hair was stringy and wild, obviously unwashed for days; maybe months. She dragged a sizable belly along the floor with her, like a dachshund. Her sagging breasts had what Von liked to call Oscar Meyer nipples, so large he just wanted to lop them off with a cleaver and toss them between two slices of bread. Where there weren’t nipples, there were enough blue lines to chart the rivers in a map of Alaska.
“They aren’t supposed to be here,” she announced. “She’s not supposed to see them. She’s not for their eyes. She’s—”
“She’s about to get raped, son!” Greg supplied for her.
“Amen to that,” Von agreed. “I don’t care if she didn’t have better s
ense than to park her ass on a wood-stove . . . I’m gonna blast my load so far up that joyhole they’ll have to wring out her kidneys to get a sperm sample.”
“She’ll bite him,” she warned.
“Then she’ll have to be beaten unconscious first. You do the honors, Greg.”
Greg nodded, mistakenly thinking that Von would give him first crack at her box if he corralled her. It wouldn’t have mattered either way. She pounced on Greg without warning, and were Von not carrying one dandy of a hard-on in his jeans, he would have laughed. He was far more interested in tenderizing some bone dry beaver than seeing Greg embarrass himself yet again, though, so he was mostly just aggravated.
“Von, get her off me! She’s using her teeth! Please, Von, she might have AIDS! C’mon, let’s just bang her and get the hell out of here!”
“Keep her occupied!” Von then unleashed the beast and set its course for Gash City. He certainly didn’t prefer to feel the deformities on her posterior, but he didn’t have all night to question the aesthetics. Sammy wouldn’t stay occupied forever, and truthfully Von couldn’t care less if Greg got his turn at bat. It was too bad for him, though, because he was definitely missing out. The passage to pleasure wasn’t without some moisture, although not immediately. It was more like there were mild obstructions as Von thrust for maximum depth, but his friction managed to puncture them and drain whatever juices they contained. It was easier going soon enough . . . if he tried not to think about all those runny scab-like things he was sliding against. He couldn’t decide if the squishing sounds were from his entry or those burn wounds peeling away and oozing. As the woman thrashed violently to free herself from either Greg or Von, he decided he didn’t much care. Either way, she was going to have some extra grease on the skillet in about 2.2 seconds.
He exploded enough to fill a two-pint milk carton just seconds before Sammy’s determined footsteps reached the attic stairs. He reluctantly pulled out and hurriedly reassembled his pants, though it was hard not to be distracted by her legs—the algae-like manifestations were positively seeping now, the semen-like emissions spreading down to her heels.
Von was pulling up his zipper when Sammy burst in, none too happy.
“What are you doing with my mother?” he asked.
“Tell the man, Greg,” Von said, craftily implying an accusation.
“Sammy, just get her off me, please!”
“They meant to rape her!” Sammy’s mother proclaimed. “He already did!”
“I’d have thought you’d learn your lesson by now,” Sammy said to Greg.
“Me? But I—”
“Short of cutting off my own or Von’s—” Von flinched. “—I can’t rustle up another dick for you to chew on. Except yours, maybe.”
“But I—”
“But no, I wouldn’t do that. I understand the temptation all too well.” Sammy fondly cupped his mother’s breast. She smiled at him, and lasciviously licked her lips. “It’s been my burden to live with her this way four years now. Her excesses resulted in the premature germs of insanity . . . her vices sprang up fast and rank. I could never put her away, though, not when we’re so close.”
He slowly pulled her off Greg and gently set her down beside him. “I told you not to come up to the attic, though, for this very reason.”
“She bit me,” Greg complained, looking rather faint. He attempted to get up.
Sammy firmly planted a foot on his chest. “Look what you’ve done to her legs.”
“But I—”
“I’m a big believer in putting things back the way you found them, so I’m going to nicely ask that you lick her clean. Then all will be forgiven.”
“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” Von admonished. “Lock and load.”
Greg looked at the slick, crusty terrain with mortal terror. Somehow the thought of eating the aborted remnants from the refrigerator seemed preferable to this. He felt like pointing out that he wasn’t completely responsible for the damage, but one look at Sammy’s face revealed there would be no bargaining. Greg winced painfully, extended his tongue, and maneuvered his face over the mother’s heels. He closed his eyes and descended until his tongue met the skin. His taste buds seemed to wither on contact like time lapse photography, but he forced himself further up, bathing her like a cat. The flavor was hideous, damn near unspeakable. He thought of a carton of orange juice, where the final swallows are enriched by a multitude of dregs, only this taste was not of citrus but spoiled honey mustard . . . which it looked like, too.
“She could get use to this,” the mother said.
The actual fluids were nothing compared to the boils and pustules from which they emitted. Their flaky, encrusted textures—like nipples still smoking after a few jolts from a Die Hard battery—were almost Greg’s swan song. He wanted to die then, to never see another day. He was crying again for the second time that night as he finished.
Sammy searched the mostly bare floor a moment before he found a drinking cup his mother had used for months. He removed the straw from it and handed it to Von.
“While I call Rochester, you get on all fours and retrieve that load you shot in my mother before I got up here.”
Von’s jaw hit the floor. He accepted the straw dumbly.
“Lock and load,” Greg mocked. He promptly gagged and puked into a silhouetted corner of the attic.
Sammy made the phone call as Von guided the straw into a place that just moments ago he’d been rather fond. He uncertainly put his lips at the end and tried to summon the courage.
“You made up your mind?” Sammy asked when Edward Rochester picked up.
“Yes . . . I’ve decided to pass. Do whatever the hell you want with her. I’ve got four more like her at the Electra Complex alone.”
Von sucked and was mortified to vividly see the ejaculate ooze back to him, like some kind of horror movie in reverse. A vein stood out in his forehead from the effort. It was one of those ridiculous straws with all the spirals, something he could remember vividly from childhood and hadn’t thought of in ages. His progress was slow and hard-fought. It felt like he was drinking a milkshake through a coffee straw.
Sammy was silent a moment. “I strongly recommend you reconsider.”
Greg, who had stopped crying, looked on the verge of a reprisal when he understood Rochester wasn’t going to pay up. Von was too absorbed by his own misery to notice. The first sips of his recon mission had arrived, and he instantly spat them onto the floorboards. When he discovered the salty discharge wasn’t purely white, he very much wanted to die just like his cohort.
“There’s nothing for me to reconsider,” Rochester said to Sammy, “but I have a proposition that might interest you.”
Celia Rochester awoke from uneasy dreams to discover she was no longer herself. Nor was she in her own bed. She was in a basement, flat on her back beneath bright fluorescent lights. She could not remember how she got here, but that seemed somewhat less important than how she wound up with two new breasts sewn beneath the ones she was born with, or why maggots were busily writhing in and around an anus which had certainly not been in her belly when she was last conscious.
“They fight off infection,” Sammy explained.
Von stood to the side cradling a disembodied head. “Poor Angelique,” he said. “She knew so well . . . fellatio.” He unzipped his pants. Noticing Celia’s baffled look, he said, “Hey, I might be a millionaire, but if I can save forty bucks, why not? Way I see it, your husband’s the sick one.” The back of Angelique’s head was soon gliding to and fro.
Celia tried to scream, but generated no sound at all.
“Edward told us to remove your vocal cords, though I don’t think he expected you to survive the procedure. He of little faith.” Sammy shrugged. “Ever seen emphysema put a hole in someone’s throat? I took the liberty of giving you one . . . except I transplanted a certain stripper’s vagina to spice it up. You might say we have a grand new opening.”
Greg
appeared beside her and began pawing her breasts. All four of them. Two for the discriminating breast connoisseur who could not abide by any artificial embellishment—these were Celia’s own—and two more paid for by the generous “philanthropists” of glory hole transactions in the Vacuum, silicone deposits which Angelique obviously had no use for anymore.
This was the life.
Rochester stowed the payment away in the trunk of Celia’s car with the option for Sammy, Greg, and Von to grab her anywhere they wanted (coincidentally they got her at an underground parking garage on her way to a divorce lawyer’s office). It made it that much easier to ensure that they got back to Sammy’s “laboratory” without any fear of being followed to home base, something that might have otherwise been problematic if Rochester had any emotional involvement to the “package.”
Three million dollars was a very good start, and it is most surely a victory when you can get paid for doing what you love.
And they were thinking about doing it to the eight other Saturday night dancers from the Electra Complex, four of whom were adamant that a certain Edward Rochester would pay dearly for their safety.
It might not result in any financial advantage, but a sister for Slut Necro Lambda was surely a worthy endeavor regardless. Getting there would be half the fun and a lot more besides.
It was worth a try.
Section I
This was never written. You are not reading this sentence. None of the following ever happened.
It’s after the end of the world . . . don’t you know that yet?
Anything that is said to have happened after December 31, 1999 is an illusion; a stubborn reflection from smoke and mirrors in the midst of a vast cosmic emptiness. I didn’t see it this way at first. I clearly recall waking up on the day masquerading as January 1, 2000. A day like any other, except it really wasn’t. Its arrival was one of the anticipated question marks in history, although there was nothing to indicate this in the headlines I saw on the newsstand. HAPPY NEW YEAR! was the best some of them could do.