The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

Quite fetching, really.

They had met, as usual, at the Cafe Harry Zero (its namesake the legendary last-gasp neo-Surrealist genius), the au courant place for the avant garde of the City in the Torrid Waste, hangout for painters, Virtual-artists, psychmontagists, Chaos-tappers, poets, pagans, perverts, and all the hippest of hip dilettantes and cognoscenti.

The room, their trysting place, was a study in dark passion. A place to release the bete noir in all its raging, lustful fury.

An Asylum of Desire.

No doors.

No windows.

The interior of the massive trapezoid all done in tufted black leather with silver concho-studs. Alight with a myriad of firefly-flickering red candles, dripping, slowly dripping rivulets of bloodred wax.

At room center, a floor-to-ceiling turnstile of ebon wood and stainless-steel hooks, displaying an SOTA atrocity exhibit of whips and chains and manacles and leather masks and body corsets.

Oh, yes.

Tantric to the max.

They peeled.

They squealed.

In one another’s arms they reeled.

The blonde delighted in Morrigan’s six champagne-cup-sized breasts.

Morrigan found the blonde’s laceup back a deliciously wicked novelty. And the mutant pleasure-folds its unfettered cincture soon revealed. She’d squandered a fortune on the DNA-surgeons and graft-mod-clinicians. She was deep into body modification. Very deep. Both scrupulously shaved armpits sported synth-vulvas, exquisitely pink and alluring. The standard nipple-rings. Her belly, as was the current fashion, was double-sexed, brandishing a quite functional twelve-inch phallus, and beneath it, a golden-mossed mons tricked out with a series of silver rings piercing her outer labia, laced with a whip-thin thong of nightblack leather. Simply begging to be untied…

She had everything money could buy.

Everything the scalpel and hormones and gene-splice could offer.

She and Morrigan pushed one another beyond the thresholds of pain and pleasure. Again. And again. And again.

Oh, she was built for pleasure.

But, when it came to that crucial question.

No. She couldn’t bleed.

In desperation, Morrigan sought the services of the electronic bulletin board. Booted up her PC. Posting a WANTED in the PERSONALS.

How mundane!

How declasse!

But it expanded her network. The bonephone in her skull soon buzzed with fresh contacts reaching out to touch her neural nexus, sublim stims the next best thing to being there…

But what a mess of hags and skaggs her urgent plea unleashed!

The outcasts from Boilsuckers Anonymous they seemed indeed. The mutant spawn of rad-burned genes, most surely. As there were no men allowed within the City, once long ago known as “… Too Tough to Die,” all propagation was clinical. Sex was pure pleasure, love and tenderness so refined (with a few S&M-fixated exceptions), only one woman could bring another such exquisite, transcendent ecstasy. Stray males from New Babylon were captured by the valiant War Mays, tormented and abused, then penned in the subterranean laserbore tunnels just beyond the dome, and milked of their venom as one might milk a viper. Then exterminated. Recent graft technology allowed the taking of organs—the addition of a stalwart, functional penis to milady’s anatomy did away with the need for those outmoded and cumbersome dildos and vibrators, once a staple of intrafemale congress. But, regrettably, once in a while the unfortunate occurred, and a tainted male was taken for de-seeding. One with radiation-twisted DNA structures…

Morrigan could scarcely believe there could be so many pathetic creatures! And all seemed eager to couple with her. Eager to offer her the crimson blossoms of their flux. Horrid bat-winged grotesques. Blubbery travesties with piglike faces. Hairy, crook-shanked things like she-goats. Walking skeletons, with bones barely encased by pallid, taut-stretched skin. Flopping, flabby dugs hanging to their navels. Drooping, flaccid buttocks. And the stinking wounds between their legs! Flesh covered by festering sores and scabrous crusts and ringworm and enflamed clusters of pus-engorged pimples… Uuuggghhhhh! How could even another of their blighted kind enjoin in amorous pursuit with such nightmarish horrors…?

How could she ever sate her cravings with beasts such as these?

Very near admitting defeat, Morrigan followed the directions she’d been given, taking a floater into the City’s most exclusive section. The triangular pad skimmed gracefully along, several inches above the pavement, homing on the coordinate data she’d punched into the locator control mounted in the armrests of the body-conforming recliner.

When she buzzed up the sec system at the luxurious compound, the soft, sensuous voice of the computer begged her indulgence while it sought access clearance for her. The wait was a matter of mere seconds. The twin semicircles of the moongate in the high wall swung open of its own accord, and the sec’s synth-voice bade her welcome.

She entered a lush, tropical garden, following a flagstone path between the broad leaves of banana trees and splitleaf philodendrons, Morrigan soon found herself in an open, gladelike area, beautifully landscaped with surrounding stone tiers planted with a wide variety of succulents and other ground covers, interspersed with a seemingly limitless variety of bizarre cacti sprouting jutting shafts, near-geometric pads, arms, and assorted outthrusts, all bristling with vicious needles.

In the center of the glade was a zero-G bubble, its machinery and generators no doubt secreted beneath the flagstone patio on which it rested. Within, Morrigan could see two quite naked forms, twisting, twining, and pleasurably writhing in a slow pinwheel spin of shapely legs, arms and assorted curves, silver-blonde and auburn- red tresses whipping about in SloMo spin. The air was filled with musical giggles, warm and melodious and crystalline, accompanied by moaning gasps and oohs and ahhs of passionate abandon…

When the pair at last slowed their spin and floated gently to the ground, they collapsed at first into a tangle of intertwined limbs. When they untangled, the former kaleidoscope of girlflesh resolved itself into two very attractive individuals of quite similar physical appearance, though both, of course, were fashionably masked. Neither seemed embarrassed nor concerned by her otherwise total nakedness.

“You’re Morrigan?” the redhead questioned.

“Yes.”

“I’m Badb,” the redhead said.

“And I’m Fea,” the blonde said. “If you haven’t already guessed—we’re sisters.” Her chin was upturned slightly, and her lips were formed in a peevish pout even as she spoke.

“Don’t mind her, she’s such a bitch! But we’re very close…” Badb added, as if Morrigan needed that explanation.

The redhead sported an owl mask, in various tones and shades of rust and brown with accents of ochre and burnt sienna and rich umber.

Her sister wore an owl mask also. But hers was snowy white, blending with the flow of her tresses, making it quite difficult to tell exactly where the hair ended and the feathers of the mask began.

Morrigan’s breath came hard and trembly. Her pulse rate elevated, drumming a tattoo of lust in her ears, her temples, and her sleek throat. Her loins tingled quite naughtily, and she felt all hot and moist and quivery down there, at the sight presented by the two lusciously nude sisters.