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.
The final seconds of December didn’t tick by so much as wind down, and it had to cross everyone’s mind that maybe we were spinning on the axis of a global tomb. We were privileged to be the children of millennial paranoia, and we dutifully watched the skies and waited for the great infernos.
Nothing happened.
“Ah . . . knew it all along” rapidly replaced the more uneasy sentiment of “We may be dicked” from twenty- four hours before. No one has ever been as disappointed as I was when I found myself earthbound at 12:01 a.m. I was so numb you could have performed open heart surgery on me without anesthesia. I’d wanted total death for everyone and everything, the entire creation laid in ashes. No great advances in humanity, no new breakthrough by which to measure our unremarkable evolution, no more accolades for reinventing the wheel. This wasn’t an idle hope for me. I’d
It was in the trepidation we all felt standing in line at the post office, watching those digital clocks with the red numbers running backward (310 DAYS 17 HOURS 26 MINUTES 32 SECONDS . . . 31 SECONDS . . . 30 SECONDS . . . until 2000). The smiles were too long, the laughter too forced, the desperate glances too apparent. The cancer was awake in us all, and nothing was benign anymore. . . . But nothing happened.
