by Wol-vriey
Despite his being a regular at Zizi’s, Ike disliked Nell so much that he’d never bought her services before. This was Nell’s first sight of Ike Dallas’s oddly shaped member.
In confusion, she wondered why it looked so much like a legless rat — tapered at both ends and massively swollen in the middle, like the missing parts from the ends had been squeezed into its center.
“Zis ees ze sweet potato cock,” Rosa interjected into Nell’s thoughts before she made the association herself. “You ees lick it sweetly, puta.”
Nell stared at the weird penis in horror. “I’m not licking this,” she said.
Ike was getting bothered. He tapped Rosa’s shoulder. “Let her go, Rosa. If the freak tells her mother — ”
Rosa shrugged his hand off. She shoved the gun barrel into Nell’s right ear. “You ees lick, puta, or your brains ees exiting your other ear. I ees impatient to have ze orgasm, so I ees only counting to four. Ze one... ze two…”
Nell was scared now. This crazy Latino bitch was loco enough to shoot her and damn the consequences.
She shut her eyes and took the head of the tuber-like penis between her lips.
CHAPTER 18
The white stallion’s hooves spat sand up behind them like a quartet of shovels.
Pistol in right hand, reins in left, Jude rode at the cowboys. He and they fired simultaneously on one another. Relentless as approaching death. Bullets flew both ways like birds.
One nicked Jude’s ear. The acrid smell of stale urine reached his nostrils from the wound. Jude smiled despite himself.
A cowboy twirling a lasso rode at Jude. He was galloping furiously, his mocha horse frothing at the lips. The cowboy rode closer. His lasso whirled above him like a plaited halo.
Jude popped him between the eyes. His lasso flew away backwards. The cowboy toppled sideways off his horse. Another horse trampled his body into the grass.
A bullet hit Jude’s arm. Urine spilled out of him onto his jacket sleeve. Jude winced. Getting shot wasn’t in itself a problem. If however, a bullet shattered an arm bone, he’d be unable to fight back.
His bottle of urine was empty — he couldn’t repair himself.
He sighted the gunman who’d hit him on the roof of the ranch house. Jude reined in his horse. In a smooth motion, he let go of its reins, raised the rifle, and fired. The man toppled off the roof.
Jude resumed his horse’s reins. His gun barked in his hand. More cowboys toppled off their mounts.
He reloaded the six-shooter. The gunfight raged on.
Jude now started worrying that something had happened to Nell.
CHAPTER 19
As Rosa had instructed Nell, she licked and sucked on Ike Dallas’s member like it was a sweet.
Nell was revolted. She could taste both Ike’s semen and Rosa’s vagina on it, and also some shit. In addition, because of the organ’s odd shape, she had a nightmare anticipation of it biting her. Its pee hole looked too much like a mouth for comfort.
Rosa finally yanked Nell’s head back.
She opened her eyes. The spindle-shaped cock now stood erect, flagpole proud.
Rosa shooed her with the pistol. “Back, back. Zis cock ees for me alone.” She climbed up on Ike Dallas and once again squatted over him.
Nell began dreading life as a prostitute with Rosa running the brothel. The woman was an absolute monster.
“Ah yess, Señor Ike, you ees so good. Yes! Be grinding it slowly like zat.” She reached back for his left hand and placed it on her chest. “Now, Señor, squeeze zis —”
Then Rosa froze. From pre-orgasm bliss, a look of confusion overtook her features. She looked back at Ike.
“What you ees doing to me, Señor?”
Rosa’s look of confusion altered to one of pain. Her lips twisted in agony, her face became a mask of horror. She fought to separate from Ike, but couldn’t, they’d somehow become fused together.
Nell looked at Ike. His eyes were glassy, focused on sights inside his head. Idiot drool dribbled from his mouth.
Rosa began screaming. Her belly swelled like she was having a baby, then it swelled more than that. Rosa’s chest swelled too.
Her eyes became pools of terror. Blood began bubbling from her lips.
Nell backed away to the wall, her eyes riveted on the screaming Mexican prostitute. She felt her way along the wall till she reached the door. Still not taking her eyes off Rosa, Nell crouched and felt the floor by the door till she found her knife.
She held it in front of her the way Father Francisco, the Catholic priest, brandished the cross to ward off evil.
Nell was terrified by what was happening to Rosa. She nonetheless remained in the room, transfixed to the spot by her deSire to witness the conclusion of this erotic horror.
Proportionate to the distortions ravaging her body, Rosa was stretching between the legs also. First her vagina widened like she was birthing a child, then it ripped open completely.
Nell was horrified. Wriggling at the base of the now torso-sized penis were a pair of scaly legs ending in black claws.
With a loud shriek, Rosa died. She’d clung onto life this long by sheer force of habit.
The front of Rosa’s corpse now opened up like it was being unbuttoned. Starting at her ripped vagina, her torso separated into two like she was being prepared for autopsy.
Nell whimpered with fright when she saw the huge rat head peering from the wreckage of Rosa’s chest. Still firmly attached to Ike at his groin, the rat was ugly beyond belief. It was hairless, with pale varicose-vein-laden skin covered in mucus and slime like a newborn human baby.
Worse still, it was still growing. Expanding out of Rosa and into the wine cellar.
By stages, Rosa’s corpse first looked like a cloak the rat-attachment was wearing, then a hood, then a rapidly shrinking hat.
Then, using a forepaw that looked like a grotesquely distorted human hand, Rattackus swiped Rosa’s corpse off its head.
It ate her in three bites.
Muzzle stained with blood, the rat god now polished its whiskers and regarded Nell with its beady eyes.
Below the monster rat, Ike Dallas now lay lifeless. His eyes were leeched of humanity and emotion. His intelligence had transferred into the creature growing from him.
Nell unfroze. In gibbering horror, she turned and fled the room and the house. She had no real memory afterward of what route she’d taken to exit the building, nor of whom she’d encountered along its corridors. She just kept running, her terror of what was growing in the wine store was of a magnitude greater than her fear of violent, angry cowboys.
***
Inside the house, Rattackus continued growing. The rat god expanded till it filled the cellar, then the pressure of its expansion crumbled the cellar walls outward like the bricks were loaves of bread.
In the pandemonium that ensued, as the rat god burgeoned out of the west wing of the ranch house, many people died. Some, when portions of the house fell on them. Others were trampled by Rattackus. Yet others were eaten by the god.
***
Nell collected her wits about her again. She felt no pity for Rosa. The Mexican woman being dead simply meant Zizi’s brothel was now Nell’s.
Amidst the ensuing confusion Nell searched for Jude.
CHAPTER 20
A shot hit Jude in the heart.
He peered down and grimaced. It was worse than undignified to watch urine spewing from one’s chest.
Cruelly ironic, he felt this pseudo-emotional proof of his being chained for life to Nell. Jude didn’t love her — but with the way his heart was leaking her excretory waters, the pump apparently didn’t share his lack of deep feeling for the woman.
Pissed-off by piss, Jude looked around for who’d shot him. He’d give the shithead what for.
There were rider-less horses all around now. Bloodied bodies lay in grass and dust. Most were dead. The few wounded clutched where they’d been shot and tried to crawl to the safety of the house.
A group of mounted ranch hands was clustered to Jude’s left, near the stacked bales of hay. Another group was riding around the right side of the house toward him.
Jude decided whoever had shot him was among the group by the stacked bales.
He yanked his horse’s reins hard left and galloped toward them.
He’d decided Nell was either dead, or — figuratively or literally — tied up. Either way, he couldn’t hang around waiting for her.
He was now fighting for his life. He couldn’t flee: if he rode away, the cowboys would pursue him and shoot him in the back.
Jude winced. The cowboys would just keep filling him with slugs till the sheer weight of the metal in his body dragged him to the ground.
Two things happened simultaneously then.
The side of the house Jude was riding toward began crumbling, and... his pistol jammed.
Jude flung the gun away and grabbed up the rifle. Gripping the horse’s flanks with his thighs, he fired on the cowboys.
Then a third group of cowboys rode around the bales of hay.
Shit, Jude thought, I’m in TROUBLE.
He was seriously outgunned now.
“I ain’t going down without a fight though.” He gritted his teeth. “And I’m taking as many of you sons-of-bitches with me as I can.”
Bullets slammed into him from front and back, till he was riddled with them. Bullets shattered his arms and legs. Jude bled endless streams of urine from his multiple punctures, till it seemed to him that his entire body was simply an extension of Nell’s extraordinary bladder.
Jude collapsed forward on his horse.
With a whoop of victory the cowboys rode forward to claim Jude’s body.
Then the west wing of ranch house exploded outward and Rattackus emerged into the light of day. Bricks, timber and house pillars flew through the air as though flung by God Almighty.
The victorious cowboys stared at the rat god in confusion. They began shooting at it.
Rattackus grabbed a horse and rider in a prehensile forepaw and stuffed both into its immense maw. Its whiskers snapped the air like immense whips as it crunched the pair into mush, their blood streaming out through its teeth.
It swallowed, then grabbed another cowboy and horse.
The cowboys abandoned all intent of fighting Rattackus and scattered in terror.
Jude’s white stallion sped through the confused cowboys toward the rear of the house, where it had just spied Nell emerge.
***
The horse halted beside Nell.
“Fix me, I’ve work to do,” Jude said, and fell out of the saddle.
Nell quickly hitched up her skirts and began urinating on him.
Jude’s horse watched her awhile, and then it began eating the flowers by the wall under the balcony.
***
Three minutes later, Jude was himself again.
The ground where he’d healed was now covered with bullets extruded from his body. His wounds were all patched up with the pee-flesh.
Jude contemplated a moment, wondering if it was possible for him to become so shot up that fixing him would make his entire body into urine-flesh. Humans were about seventy-five percent water — Jude was sure he was already about forty percent pee now.
Nell handed him his white pistol. She pointed over at Rattackus, now reared up on its rear legs and grabbing and eating the milling rider-less horses. It was growling loudly. “We’ve got a bigger problem than we came here to fix,” she said.
Jude nodded grimly. “For sure. Do you know what it is?”
Nell’s face blanched as she remembered her ordeal in the wine cellar. “It’s Ike Dallas’s penis. While he was fucking Rosa it started getting bigger and bigger and then it ate her.”
She thought, and then added, “I’ve seen one like it before. That one emerged ten years ago from Mount Ass. That was the reason Zizi fled the ranch — it attacked the house and killed half her cowboys. Then it turned on the townsfolk of Little Ass. It killed a fifth of the people, including the sheriff. Then Edison got rid of it. He killed it. He said he’d used some veterinary poison.
“After that, Zizi didn’t stand a chance of getting her ranch back. The ranchers and townspeople all turned a deaf ear when she protested. There was a suspicion... still is... that she’d been responsible for the monster’s appearance.”
“I can just imagine that,” Jude said. Looking over at Rattackus, he could see a man-sized shape where the monster’s genitals should be. “You’re saying that’s Ike dangling between the rat’s legs?”
Nell nodded. “Yep.” She grinned evilly. “I always knew Ike Dallas was a prick, but not that big a prick.”
“Give me your knife,” Jude told Nell.
She handed it over.
Jude ran out from the cover of the house to where a cowboy’s corpse laid, his head full of a still-living porcupine.
He stomped the porcupine’s head in to stop its squealing. Then he pulled both the cowboy’s gloves off and hacked off all his fingers, excluding the thumbs.
He ran to another corpse and chopped off that dead man’s fingers also.
Then he ran back to Nell’s side. He broke open his white pistol and loaded fingers into it. He clicked the cylinder back into place in the gun and spun it once.
He whistled his horse over. When the horse came, he lifted its tail and gave its ass-lever a few cranks so it wouldn’t break down on him.
He swung himself up into the saddle.
“Best you wait here,” he told Nell. “This is real dangerous.”
She shook her head emphatically. “Not me. I’m coming with you. Are you kidding, Jude? There is no way I’m leaving your side with that thing around.”
She grinned. “Besides, you seem to need repairing a lot. You’ll get nowhere without me.”
Jude winced. This was much worse than marriage.
Then he nodded. He reached down and pulled Nell up into the saddle.
CHAPTER 21
When the ranch house began shaking, Edison forgot about buttoning up his fly and ran to the bedroom window to peer out.
He surveyed the ensuing carnage angrily.
“Your rat god is destroying our house,” he told Valhalla testily. “I thought you had ways of containing the blasted rodent.”
Valhalla rushed to the window also.
Together they watched the hairless monster emerge from the west wing of their home amidst building rubble.
Its head was the size of a wagon. Its twitching ears looked like brown sails fluttering in sea breeze. The varicose veins covering Rattackus’s fat-laden form twitched as though each possessed an individual heart.
“Hell and damnation!” Valhalla swore. “I’ve made a mistake.”
“What are talking about?”
Her facial expression was as earnest as her voice. “I thought you said Ike Dallas was outside the building.”
“I never saw him downstairs. I’d assumed he was coordinating the cowboys, but they’d not seen him either. One of them even suggested he was dead.” Edison squinted at the monster rat. Panic began building in him. Over the intervening years he’d forgotten how big the thing was — almost as large as the ranch house. “That, however, is neither here nor there. What does Rattackus have to do with Ike Dallas?”
“Ike Dallas is its familiar. After we scared off Zizi, I had to store the rat god somewhere. Ike was the somewhere.”
It took a moment for Edison to understand what she meant. The cowboys had found a dazed Ike wandering out on the range the week after Rattackus had driven Zizi off her ranch. Ike had had amnesia. He’d seemingly survived an Apache raid on a stagecoach headed north, and trekked his way onto their land.
Edison shook his head. “So that’s why you didn’t allow me to sack the drunken bum all this while?”
“Calm down, Edison,” Valhalla said softly. “We can rebuild this house. All it will take is money, and we’ve an excess of that.” She smiled thinly. “I overreacte
d just now — I was bothered about the antiques in the parlor — those we bought on our trip to France.”
Edison nodded wearily. He looked out of the window. As though on cue, at that moment Jude rode into view.
“There he is,” Valhalla said. Her expression turned icy when she saw Nell was riding pillion to Jude. “What is most important now is to kill this assassin.”
“Yes,” Edison agreed. “But so far he’s proven atrociously hard to kill. And now the bastard has his pistol back.”
“It will be little help against Rattackus. Though a mindless brute, Rattackus is a god after all.”
She pointed. “And you have his rifle, Edison. He can’t use it anymore.”
Edison smiled wickedly. “But I can, mon Cherie.”
Valhalla nodded. “It’s my experience that most supernatural assassins are susceptible to being killed by their own weapons. Likely this one too.”
“But your daughter — she’s with him?”
She shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do if Nell’s so intent on committing suicide, is there? All she ever does is cause trouble.”
Edison pulled a chair up to the window. He raised the carved wooden firearm to his shoulder and sighted along its barrel. “Order us up some coffee, will you, darling? I feel like having some target practice.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait, Edison,” came the reply. “Judging from where Rattackus emerged from, I’d say the kitchen is destroyed. Which means Consuela is dead for certain. Eaten maybe…”
Edison grunted in disgust. He hated missing his afternoon coffee. He leaned on the windowsill and aimed the wooden rifle at his galloping enemy.
***
Valhalla put herself into a trance. She concentrated, focused. Across a psychic bridge, she made connection with Rattackus’s minute mind.
The connection was momentary, but she made the most of that moment.