Love Is a Beehive

 

Chris Tannhauser

 


He could forgive her love for truck stop buffets and the fact that her admirable physical fitness seemed to stem from nothing more than moonlight strolls and the digging of “therapy” holes, but the unsent text message on her phone dropped his heart into his gut.  It was just a string of numbers, really, with an area code somewhere in Central Asia.  His hands shook and his vision blurred.  The shame he felt for daring to snoop was brutally knocked from his mind.  Who is he? he thought, staring at her phone in a world gone suddenly sunless.
 

•••

The day he met Mysti (spelled y before i, like a stripper) was hazy at best—he remembered a little bit about a weird-looking kid in an alley asking him, “Hey mister, can you help me find my mom?” and then he was waking up in her basement naked, duct-taped to a folding chair under a single bare bulb.  The kid was there, fidgeting with a pack of cigarettes.  Mysti had that wide-stance thing that meant she was about to let you know what was what, dressed in her goin’-out overcoat, painted-on jeans, and walkin’ boots, dark hair down and wild with a shovel over one shoulder.  Mitch (spelled the regular way, like a guy who never missed Pokémon night) was confused as there wasn’t anywhere to even dig a hole down here, what with the floor being concrete and everything.  His chest hurt, and when he looked down he saw a mess of little foot-shaped bruises like he had been trampled by a kindergarten class.
 
Mysti showed teeth beneath dead eyes.  “Tell me about the time you hit your girlfriend,” she said.
 
Mitch groped through a brain like spilled soup.  “I don’t—I don’t have a girlfriend.”
 
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said the weird kid.
 
“Tell me about the time you struck a woman.”  Mysti flipped the shovel off her shoulder and plonked it point down, leaning forward on it, her eyes as black as her knuckles where white.  
 
Mitch felt as if his flesh were transparent, his bones little more than whispers, his soul flayed wide and glistening beneath her glare.  “I didn’t—I don’t—” and his mind congealed enough to realize he was in real mortal danger here as the cage in the corner didn’t look very lived in at all, like it was more of a temporary thing, and no one who was ever locked up in it was locked up for long, at least not long enough to leave a mark or even try to worry at it.  His mouth kind of went loose then and he entered a flow state he’d never experienced before or since where he tried to explain how everything he knew about relationships came from SPERMAGEDDON X and the X was a number, not a content qualifier, as the previous nine spermageddons were apparently insufficient, and because he was that guy he’d never actually had a girlfriend, just a series of random fucks with women who weren’t looking for boyfriends at all but didn’t want to be alone for 25 minutes and 51 seconds, and yeah, some of them liked to be choked, and okay, some of them like to get hit but not hit like that, like it was about evoking a sensation in soft tissue, just a wake-up sting, like a pinched nipple, but not to really hurt anyone or leave a mark that wasn’t gone the next day and everyone seemed to go away happy or at least not disappointed because the only thing more important than a condom was consent.
 
Mysti and the weird kid looked at each other.  The kid shrugged and tapped a cigarette out of the pack.  Mysti burst out laughing.  The sound actually made Mitch feel a little better because it was clear she thought something was really funny.
 
“Put him in the cage,” she said when she caught her breath.
 
The kid pulled a face.  “But—”
 
“You heard me.”
 
“Goddammit,” said the kid around his unlit cigarette.  He struggled to knock Mitch over and then struggled and grunted as he scrape-dragged Mitch and the folding chair across the concrete floor in fits and starts and Mitch did his best to help, kind of inchworming his way over the lip of the cage by hinging the chair where he could until he was in and the door was clanged shut and padlocked.
 
“I like this one,” Mysti grinned.
 

•••

 
 
The day she met Mitch was like any other; it certainly didn’t feel like the life-defining inflection point it turned out to be.  He was just supposed to be the next pulse in a steady beat of serial killings, bludgeoned to death with a shovel in an alley, not her person, not the man who gave her everything she dared the world to relinquish.  She was the one who held hearts in her hand, not the other way around.
 
If she were the sundress tradwife-type who put up stupid signs in her house, hers would say LIFE IS A BALL PIT FULL OF HOLOCAUST SHOES.  She preferred knotty, complex things with blood-soaked history, like her metallic blue 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, or that absolutely ludicrous chopper she got off an enormous biker-cum-meth-mogul named Bear that had lots of welded chain, chipped chrome, and a goddamn fenderless truck tire for a rear wheel—if your ass came off the seat it was going straight onto the tread at speed—it had a V-twin with a blower, all exposed belts and pulleys under the scoop, hungry for ankles.  It sounded like an avalanche of Panzers with some ’67 Huey hog harmonics thrown in for good measure, as subtle as an airborne blitzkrieg.
 
“Looks like a lot of bike for a little lady,” shouted every random douche she bumped into while straddling the throbbing beast.
 
“Ooh, is it ever,” she would reply.  “Maybe you should come back to my place and help me with it?”  ...aaand dead.
 
This was the trick.  Every ambush predator has to come out of a hole—a physical, societal, metaphorical, or conceptual blind spot.  At truck stops she adjusted her gait as she strode across the nightslick parking lot, shortening her steps, catching a toe, stooping like she had 10 miles of bad road on her back, becoming the lot lizard, hiding inside things that look like victims.  She slid into a cab with practiced resignation and said “Get it out for me,” so his hands were in his lap when hers were on the knife and three quick pops to the neck and then pushing that look of deep confusion away to keep the blood on the dash.  
 
But sanity requires hobbies, and to keep things straight she dreamed up bigger and bigger kills, like that one time she took a contract and ended up with 13 dead, none of them the actual target—she got wind that they considered her less a professional and more a loose end, so she doubled back and cleaned up on her own.  Lost a tooth and limped for a week, but it was worth it to teach fistfuls of lessons, learned and then lost at the ends of crowbars and revolvers.
 
But the pearl in the oyster, the lustrous thing she thought she loved more than anything in the world until she met Mitch, was nuclear fucking Armageddon.  It started with an honest-to-god Soviet ICBM launch key she wore around her neck, the weight of it between her breasts a pendulous reminder of the great mass of fear and hate and greed with an oily sheen of patriotism that lay buried and waiting.  She collected documents, photographs, patches, chipboard and plastic fallout calculator wheels, and at the center of her collection, at the very heart of her before she met Mitch, the nuclear launch codes for a lone SS-9 Scarp intercontinental ballistic missile in Turkmenistan.  It took a fractal chain of time, effort, kids and crypto to secure it, but it was more than worth it.  Just looking at the numbers gave her the focused predatory rush of following a would-be john into the men’s room for ritual strangulation—only magnified 8.3 billion times.
 
All she had to do was send that signal, a pebble flicked atop a mountain-peak snow shelf, to deform the authenticating layer and pierce the insufficient fail-safes, flipping zeros to ones and offs to ons from machine to brain to hand to a mechanical twist that jolts 45,000 pounds of chemical propellent into a self-perpetuating cascading reaction that lifts the missile into the sky on a pillar of flame over the desolate Karakum Desert; within a minute it’s at 100,000 feet and igniting the second stage to push for orbit; in another minute it’s at 300,000 feet and the third stage lights to kick the orbital bus over the long, dark-blue arc of the horizon; and a minute after that it’s flying silent above the North Pole, little more than a city-killing bullet at this point, before Earth calls to its wayward child with the voice of gravity and the bus kicks out the warhead and a swarm of penetration aids, aluminum chaff and decoy warheads, and after falling into the thickening atmosphere and surviving maximum aerodynamic heating while decelerating to a stately Mach 20 with the sketchy outlines of the terminal city in view, the warhead arms itself—
 
—and she comes.
 
She had no intention of actually using the digits—that would be insane.  Civilization was the grass to her tiger, and she wasn’t about to burn her hiding place.
 

•••

 
 
Dhruv was jonesing for a cig and vaguely embarrassed to be dressed as a kid again, but it was either that or Mysti would do her thing to him instead.  It was a long fall from self-styled dapper criminal mastermind to serial killer’s assistant, and he had hit his head on every goddamn rung on the way down.  By his second job they had him crawling through HVAC ducts, and it never really got any better.  The end came when he tripped an alarm while wedged in a transom and the guys scattered, leaving him hanging for the cops to take pictures and laugh a good long time before they bothered to get him down.  He went to prison for a short stint that went bad pretty much from the get-go.  Everything you can imagine happening to a little person in prison happened to him, only doubly so because he had a mouth on him.
 
None of this made any sense.  He held no fewer than three Guinness Book World Records for chrissakes, and if you’ve ever looked into those you know it’s no mean feat—things that you can imagine killing someone in three days stand for a week; amounts that are surely illegal are exceeded ten times over.  His records were for Glass Chewed in a Single Sitting (14 kilos), Sustained Blows from a Supermarket Checkout Divider (10,481), and Breath-holding Under Duress (5 minutes, 17 seconds).  He was practically a comic book superhero.
 
Dhruv gave a smokeless sigh and picked a likely-looking simp out of the sidewalk flow just beyond the mouth of the alley, someone who wouldn’t put up too much of a fight—she might like it rough, but that shit scared the piss out of him.  “Hey mister, can you help me find my mom?”
 
The simp turned his head even as the rest of the crowd didn’t.  The hook thus set, Dhruv faded into the alley.
 
“Hey—hey little guy,” said the simp.  “What seems to be the trouble?”
 
Dhruv made a face.  “I think my mom’s back here somewhere.”  He walked back around the dumpster like Mysti told him to.
 
The simp followed, and Mysti stepped out, grinning, a shiny, stickered shovel over her shoulder.
 
“Oh!” said the simp, startled.  “Are you his mother?”
 
“Nope,” she said, “I’m the bad bitch who’s gonna kill you with a shovel.”
 
“Uh,” said the simp, and fainted dead away.
 
Dhruv and Mysti stared at him for a moment.
 
“Slap him awake,” she said.
 
Dhruv put his little hands on the simp’s neck.  “He doesn’t have a pulse!”
 
“Well, do CPR or something.”
 
Dhruv spread his arms.  “Have you seen me?  I can’t!  I’m too small!”
 
“Then get on his chest and dance, little man!”
 
“Wha—what dance should I do?”
 
“What?”
 
“I mean, which dance is best for CPR?”
 
“Maybe something shovel related?” she growled.
 
Dhruv landed on the simp’s chest with both feet and started doing the first thing that came out of his body, a reflex, really, from middle school: The Running Man—arms out and back, stomp and slide, stomp and slide, just like Vanilla Ice ripping off MC Hammer.
 
Unbeknownst to both of them, the simp was currently having a vision of a disappointingly genderless angel.  YOU HAVE TO GO BACK, it said in a voice like an avalanche, THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY IMPORTANT JESUS NEEDS YOU TO DO.
 
The simp woke up crying and you know the rest; as for Dhruv, this is the last we’ll ever see of him—so we just have to hope something really good happened to him, like winning the lottery, and drowning in a bubble bath with like three supermodels, high as a fucking kite.
 

•••

 
 
Like many predators who revel in the joy of the hunt, Mysti liked to play with her food.  She was nude, sitting on the edge of the bed, legs spread.  Mitch stood before her likewise naked, erection throbbing with noose-terror and whatever she had shot him up with.
 
“I don’t get it,” he said finally.
 
“Well,” she said, “you better think hard and figure it out.”
 
“Does my life depend on it?”
 
She laughed.  “Oh yeah.”
 
“What do you want?” he asked.
 
“I want whatever you think you can get away with.”
 
He glanced at the bedroom door.
 
“You’ll be three-steps dead before you get close.”
 
“I’m dead anyway.”
 
“Like a true samurai, honey.  This is your lady or the tiger moment.  Either you figure this out and die like a man, or you don’t and you get the shovel.”
 
There was a quiet, electric moment and something happened in him, something from the angel maybe, or whatever was in the hypodermic—he saw CEOs in handcuffs, the pyramid on the dollar screwed upside down, the gradient of mollusks from hard to soft and the timidity fled him like a ballon kissing open flame—he grabbed her wrist, yanked her sideways and flipped her over, put his knees between her thighs and clamped a hand onto the back of her neck, pressing her into the mattress—she gasped as he spit on his cock and reached down with the other hand to rub it up and down against her until her folds gave way to liquid heat; as he built to a rhythm that made the bed shudder, he wasn’t just fucking a pussy or even fucking her—he was fucking the world, not giving, not taking, just pure animal dominance.  She arched her back into the pounding and when she came it was harder than anything she could ever do for herself.
 

•••

 
 
Love is a beehive, a myriad of little things, turning, dancing, pressing and sliding against each other, and somehow, after a revelry of this, the honey comes out.  The way she took a drinking straw with her teeth first, then enclosed it with her lips; the absent-minded finger-pass to tuck her hair behind an ear; the zig-zag crease between her brows when she was concentrating.  Sure, there was the mind-blowing head she gave him in the back seat of her Lincoln Continental, but 25 minutes and 51 seconds later you’re back to the other 23-and-a-half hours of the day, and you damn well better find something just as good to squeeze between the rest of the ticks and tocks.  And so they did.
 

•••

 
 
Who is he? he asked the universe again, looking at the unsent message on her phone.  He took a deep breath that caught at the end—and pressed send, awaiting what he hoped wouldn’t be a world-shattering reply from her secret lover.

NIGHTFEAST

Chris Tannhauser

You would not be wrong if you thought you saw Primrose and Pansy—world-famous conjoined twins, the celebrated “two-headed girl”—exiting the mass shooting event at The Vampire’s Kiss lounge in Manhattan with a back-slung combat shotgun and depleted bandoliers. Prim’s face was streaked with gore and a thousand-yard grimace, while Pansy sported a black head bag, cinched around her neck, for some reason. It’s true Prim yelled at a dumpy-looking guy with greasy hair and glasses, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” as she clambered up the side of a Cold War-era tracked APC and down the hatch, then tore off into the inky coils of a city-at-night illustration.

You did see these things, because while Pansy may have been a kindergarten teacher, Prim was a goddamn vampire hunter.

A couple things about the twins: Your mirror image bobs along with you everywhere you go on an ethereal tether—it’s ever-present, peeking like a conjured ghost from windows, car fenders, still pools of water. But imagine your mirror image embodied, imbued with voice, a permanent presence regardless of where you happen to glance. This was all they ever knew, and what they couldn’t quite explain. Make all the jokes you want about V-neck sweaters—they don’t care—they had two legs, two arms, two heads, but only one heart. The sister not a copy or an echo but a broader sense of self, a limelit stage and theater instead of being stuck in the one-bulb dressing room.

Now, the great thing about vampires is that you already know everything about them: how they drink jet fuel for kicks, how they fly with rainbows coming out of their butts, and how they give off a constant tuning-fork whine.

Of course, the vampires of fiction are debonair aristocrats possessed of the refinement of æons—the beautiful dead sheened in a glaze of taste, style, and world-weary insouciance... but in reality, they’re all misfits, either by the circumstances of their second birth or by the interminable caress of clock hands. After all, what’s fashionable in Hell is confusing in the dim embers of our world, and eating like a serial killer inevitably devolves into dressing like one.

As for vampire hunters, there were two kinds: wizards (who all smelled of cat piss and Hot Pockets), and techs. Prim was a stone-cold tech—instead of focusing her will into a singularity to warp reality or some shit, she put her trust in large amounts of kinetic energy delivered abruptly and liberally.

Prim had started out with a wizard sidekick, Marty, mainly because he had a car, a lime-green ‘75 Gremlin with a blown 304 and torn-out back seat. At that time, he was working on a special project—“The Martymobile”—a surplus Soviet BTR-50 Amphibious Armored Personnel Carrier, a growling, diesel-belching monstrosity painted with enough teenage skateboard iconography to strike fear into long-dead hearts.

As a wizard, Marty left a lot to be desired. He was known mostly for what he called his “magic murder rock”, which he swore had been ensorcelled at great peril to his immortal soul. He shouted impressive-sounding spell names as he swung it to crack heads and knock bloody teeth into the carpet. But in all the time Prim had worked with him, he never once made anything disappear, not even his virginity.

Prim felt bad, but what happened to Marty was his own goddamn fault. There were no numbered rules in the vampire hunting game—in fact, it was something of an in-group pastime to shout things like, “Rule number seventeen, no smoking in bed!” as you dropped a coffin lid on a startled vampire and a pinless grenade—but it turned out the last one, Rule Omega, was “Never let a vampire drink jet fuel.”

It was a standard raid, some Count Orlok wanna-be—Magnus Swankpot—loading his party jet with pretty little things for a picnic in international airspace—but they crashed the party early, caught him in his hangar, killed his crew and sent the girls packing. After the bright-lit, wide-open space was done echoing with gunfire and screams, they had him cuffed and tied to a heavy wooden chair, like a leftover prop from a Hammer film. The cops would be here tout de suite, and they needed to get this over with. Standard procedure meant digging a narrow hole, dumping the vampire in head first, dousing it with an accelerant, and letting Mother Earth absorb the threats and curses until it was done.

Here, they were going to have to Quảng Đức him, and hope he would pyre himself out before the restraints burned through. But Marty had another idea: Why not funnel him like they do in dirtbag crime movies? So Marty took his magic murder rock to Magnus’ protesting mouth, jammed a funnel down his throat, and poured military-grade jet fuel straight into his gullet. And that’s the moment the Good Old Days officially ended.

The jet fuel made Magnus go nuts with psychotic strength, snapping the cuffs and standing up out of the chair in a cloud of splinters and rope—then he farted a rainbow and careened off the high ceiling, which would have been hilarious except for the torn bodies he left in his wake. Prim and Pansy were the only ones who made it out alive that night, looking back over their shoulders once from the darkened tarmac to see Marty snatched sideways out of frame by a Lucky Charms commercial.

Word spread, and pretty soon all the vampires were mainlining jet fuel, leaping into the sky with an ejaculatory grunt, bodies flexed in an orgasmic posture, rainbows streaming from their gaping anuses. And the sound, the sound was like glitter, like dollar bills dusting glitter off a stripper’s tits.

††

The head-bagging started after Pansy got PTSD from all the vampire stuff: stepping into the splash zone of a breaching charge, watching terrified undead juggle a live grenade, then the things bullets do, and close-in knife work with snapping fangs and grave-breath in the face—if she was going to be along for the ride, she put her foot down, it was going to be with earplugs and a head bag, because no one wanted to see that shit. It wasn’t long after that she demanded the bag whenever Tingleboy came over.

Pansy didn’t date, but Prim had Tingleboy, something like a boyfriend, a tattooed carcinogen she indulged in whenever she won the Saturday night coin-flip to see who got the pussy. Tails meant giving it up to Tingleboy doggy style—‘cuz he knew how to wreck it just right—as Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” ground the air into a mindless paste; heads meant pampering it like a fancy pet, elaborately trimmed, powdered, gently fed from the palm of the hand on pink satin pillows with something whiny and tinkly plinking in the background, the slow-build orgasm jolting Prim awake.

But when she was with Tingleboy, the thing that got her there every single time was the forbidden thought that he was riding her as just one woman, her sister made tiny and far, nothing but a quiet whimper under a shivering pillow.

The same whimper she made, distantly, when Magnus got his hands on them.

Prim figured they were dead when it all caught up with them—the jokes, the violence, the violation from every quarter—but Magnus was glad for what her kind had given to his, and wanted to magnanimously reward her with what he called “freedom”.

“If you turn us,” screamed Prim, “we will rise and destroy you! We would rather die than have your ‘freedom’!”

“Oh, child,” cooed Magnus, “I’m not turning you. I’m setting you free.”

The worst part, the very worst part, was that even as Pansy began to realize what was happening, as the hands closed around her pulsing throat, even as Prim felt the vicarious body-panic and the absolute soul-tearing horror of feeling her sister, who was her very self, tumble away down a shaft of dwindling panic, there was, somewhere deep in the dark, the tiniest spark of relief.

††

Prim quit the business and threw herself into Tingleboy’s briar patch—it was everything you can imagine, and many things you can’t—for the only place their worlds overlapped was in their pants. She was his better in every way and he was no longer a strong enough opiate. The end came when she woke one night to Tingleboy nudging Pansy’s slack mouth with the head of his cock.

After the blackout, Prim knew Tingleboy was gone, but what she didn’t know was that no one would ever really find his body, that the Hefty bag of biosludge would take the coroner a good month to even ID as human—all that, just a black hole, like that one time she woke up with bangs.

But this time, this time she woke with an unslaked murder-thirst.

††

It was in the deep blue predawn anti-gloaming that Prim breached Magnus’ Art Deco sanctum with the Martymobile, treads making a hash of the precise granite stairs and getting air through the church-glass doors—as it ronched down into the parquetry she cranked the steering levers in opposite directions and floored it again, doing mad donuts and throwing up a polished walnut rooster tail in every direction. The 14-tonne wad of steel, fire, and hate slewed through the interior walls, knocking all the fancy finery to splinters and peeling tapestries and curtains off the walls and into the treads.

Prim locked the brakes and skidded sideways through the marble edifice of a flamboyantly gargoyled fireplace built somewhere far away at great expense, then dismantled, shipped, and remanteled here at great expense, and now demolished into raining chunks for the cost of a gallon of diesel. She gave the vampires a six-count to gather their wits, hiss dramatically, and burst down the stairs in a furball of anthill rage... On “six” she popped smoke, only she had swapped out the benign signal grenades for white phosphorus rounds, blanketing the room in searing phosphorus pentoxide and peppering the howling undead with nuggets of pure hellfire. She gave another six-count to allow the stragglers to make it to the party, then she triggered the reactive armor, blasting the flesh from their bones.

She popped the hatch and stood, her face obscured by a gas mask, Pansy’s head next to hers, encased in an honest-to-God saint’s reliquary from the Vatican, all gilt and bullet-proof glass, the head of John the Baptist having been shaken out of the getaway car’s window like a half-finished Happy Meal. The box was lit from within, illuminating Pansy’s half-lidded eyes over cheeks flush with murder blood. Prim took the pintle-mounted 12.7 mm DShk heavy machine gun in both fists and ran an entire belt out into the second floor from underneath.

She grapnel gunned up to the third floor, rising out of the white smoke on a thrumming cable and onto her feet in full battle rattle—grenades, pistols, shotgun, rifle, and a whisper-thin ceramic shard that was a knife the same way people are apes. Her carbon-fiber Make-A-Wish exoskeleton whined to life.

This was the party floor. The first two were people floors, meant for guests and plausible deniability, outfitted to look like movie sets. But up here, on the third floor, this is where the undead cut loose, raving with humans, bringing life to the party as it were, but they did forget to feed and water the ones they didn’t drain, as dead as forgotten pets, flopped over one another like Burning Man kaleidoscoped with the Holocaust.

Prim unslung her combat shotgun and reached back to key the emitter in her purple Dora the Explorer backpack—a blazing hologram of Christ being whipped rose above her twin heads, a nod to the idea that vampires should cower before such imagery, though it seemed to cause more confusion than discomfort.

But sometimes a moment of confusion is all you need. They converged on Prim from all directions, from every stinking hole, and every time a vampire looked up and winced, she blew a mess through their chest or knocked their head off with a shotgun blast. Here, she witnessed the full flower of vampire culture in all its endless forms: the hooker whose coffin was probably a dumpster; the pregnant one whose undead fetus will never be born, forcing her to eat for two for all eternity; the dude in the distressed denim jacket, moon boots, and no pants, with a gaping hamburger badger den where his genitals should be; too-many-hospital-gowns guy; trash-bag-diaper lady; and so on, ad nauseam, etc.

When the shotgun was empty, she dropped it—eschewing the luxury of a reload—and activated the twin 20 mm autocannons on the rooftop next door. Details evaporated into a sideways storm of splinters, chunks, and screams—the manufacturer suggested that you choose something weirdly specific as an IFF indicator, like a purple Dora the Explorer backpack, say—so all the chaos wedged around Prim like sleet off a sideways umbrella.

After the cannons went silent Prim peeled the gas mask—her face flush and sweaty, dark hair sticking to her cheeks—and worked her way up to the fourth floor along the edge of a tattered staircase, hugging the pock-marked wall with her back. She stalked through the mansion, the stragglers actively avoiding her now, allowing her to stoke and build the rage she had nearly spent below.

She knew she was getting close when she ran into the surgical centaur with a gimp mask and ball gag.

“Well,” she actually said aloud, “that’s different.”

The thing snorted, its great Frankenstein-stitched belly flexing, as it hefted the diagonal-cut axle from a car some tabloid mom drove into a canal to drown her children.

Prim set her exoskeleton to BREAK SHIT and charged even as the beast surged into a gallop and raised the axle over its black-leather-laced head—Prim slid beneath it, tucking herself between the obliterating hooves, coming out the other side behind a wave of gore and looping intestines, crimson-licked knife in her fist. The centaur stamped, gagged on the ball in its mouth, and tried to turn in the tangling morass of its own innards before collapsing and literally coming apart at the seams.

And that was it. Magnus had to be around here somewhere—the oldest vampires, the richest, they always had something shockingly expensive and outrageously stupid as their miniboss, it’s like they couldn’t help themselves. And then they’d be stunned when it didn’t work. The expense! The effort! The sheer brilliance of it! Of course it had to be right—I thought of it myself! But then, true intellect and self-awareness were not exactly vampire traits.

††

Prim found Magnus lounging sideways on a shitty TV-show throne, something someone had told him was cool once, so he drove the owner of the Pasadena storage joint where it was kept into bankruptcy and bought the business at a fire-sale price so his agents could pop the padlock, claim the janky nerd seat, and torch the place for the insurance money.

Magnus was wearing one of Elvis’ Vegas-era bejazzled jumpsuits, a roomy white leather job with a spattering of faux jewels and terrycloth internals that had never been laundered because white leather—it was soaked with the very essence of The King, a potent, sloshing bath of testosterone, uppers, downers, alcohol, and hurled panties.

Marty stood before him in the vast and filthy throne room, monochrome in shadow and blacked windows. His insides dripped from his groin in glistening gray wattles as he read aloud from a crumpled, dirty notebook with faux-Shakespearean gravitas:

“...tarot girls turn cards and say, ‘Things from beyond the stars lick the sweat off your dreams,’ but so it is at every scale, whale-fall in the deep when cetacean corpses drip into that far seabed that comes suddenly alive with chitinous, multi-jointed life, boiling like your mattress when you lay yourself down to sleep only to awaken a nightfeast of mites in their tens of millions, a carnival at the knees of fleas, those lumbering titans—”

Prim’s hand reflexively reached for a grenade.

“Stop,” said Magnus, “both of you.”

Marty turned and didn’t look the least bit surprised.

Prim addressed him. “You know what we promised we’d do if the other turned.”

Marty spread his arms. “I didn’t turn—this is becoming! I’m more me than I’ve ever been, Prim!”

“You were supposed to be better than this,” Prim said, “you were supposed to transcend mere flesh, remember?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Marty took a step forward, entrail skirt waggling. “I have passed through the night and into that brighter day! The fog is gone! Everything is energy! It’s glorious!”

Magnus sat up and leaned forward, clutching the edge of his seat and tapping his feet. “I knew you’d be back,” he enthused, “I just knew it! And you’ve exceeded all my expectations. I haven’t been this entertained in—” he looked down and furrowed his brow. “Well, in a very long time. But it doesn’t have to end here. Together, we can wipe away the past, build something new and exciting! Something to seize the Earth and make the gods tremble!” His eyes blazed blue in the darkness.

Prim stared.

Marty cleared his throat. “Take the Master’s offer—you’ll live forever.”

“What about Pansy?” Prim said too quickly.

Marty clucked his tongue. “She’s already flown the coop. Took the eggs with her. You wouldn’t like what happens when you… reanimate the dead. We can get her something even cooler than that terrarium you have her in, something—something befitting your love for her?” He trailed off and shrugged. “Or we could just cinch a cord around it till it falls off.”

Prim startled at the word love—a dead thing, a stone in her gut... Pansy was gone. Her light and life, the best part of her, erased from the world like a thumb across a tear. What more could she hope for?

Magnus sat back and steepled his fingers at her hesitation. Marty chuckled softly.

And yet—

Beneath that stone, that magnetic rock of dead love, the atomic spark of life.

This wasn’t a hand reaching down to raise her up, but the desperate grasp of the fallen to drag her down into a long, irretrievable descent—the only thing they ever really had to offer.

Prim responded to that grasping hand in kind, stripping the grenade of its pin and tossing it at Marty in a single motion, a motion that continued to her slung M4 carbine.

Marty caught the grenade reflexively, bobbled it, turned and tripped in the puddle of himself.

Magnus snarled and leaped as the grenade WHAPPED Marty’s corpus into a shower—but the throne Magnus sat upon was not actually iron—it was fiberglass—and his Elvin spangles caught in the elaborate back of it, the whole thing cracking in half instead of throwing him skyward.

Prim shouldered the blunt M4 and flicked the selector from UH OH to OH NO and let an entire magazine of 5.56 NATO fly—as a contortional blur, Magnus dodged most of it, but as rounds began to find a home in his flesh, he became less frenzied, more in focus, finally slouching back into his ruptured throne.

With practiced economy Prim dropped the spent mag and slotted a fresh one, snapped the charging handle back, and filled him like a beehive at sunset.

got that spiderblood in me

 

 Chris Tannhauser

 

 

 

You’re in a dugout canoe, and it’s raining arrows. They pepper the sea to froth around you, and thunk into the gunwales. You raise your bookmarked Bible to show these naked beach people that you are here with God’s blessing and certainly have no intent of stealing the sacred fungus from their shaman’s ghost pouch, the fungus which elongates life like a nightmare hallway and can, in certain circumstances, raise the dead for brief, desperate conversation.  

 

The sound of a Paleolithic arrow going through the Bible is the same one your neck will make three days from now when you finally make landfall and these people get their hands on you.

SPIDERBLOOD—you know the stuff, the eponymous penis pill cum energy drink, and like an old-timey clubhouse it’s strictly NO GIRLS ALLOWED. And when they started guzzling it, man-o-man, it turns out there’s such a thing as a “lady boner” and it’s wild. And that’s why President Reagan (bless his scintillating corpse) replaced Milwaukee with the Milwaukee Metro Area Memorial Crater.

A day later you wake in a bamboo cage, like something out of a castaway sitcom, covered in someone else’s blood. For such a small tribe, they sure do know how to handle people—proving their shared humanity after all. More clichéd TV stuff as the sun sets beyond the jungle clearing and the drums and fires start. But none of this is funny. It’s not funny at all.

 

Their shaman, creased and slouched and grinning, giggles as he fingers his ghost pouch. 

 

You shit yourself again.

SPIDERBLOOD hit the manosphere like an MMA liver TKO—on the Gettin’ It podcast with Dirty Dan & The Weasel, they called it “liquid Jesus” and could not stop gushing about how it optimized their workouts and made morning wood into an all-day affair. With just a handful of all-natural ingredients

 

guarana

ovolactin

hysteriglam

and some kind of “magic man” mushroom extract from the jungle or some shit

 

it would reforge your dick into a porn truncheon and make your cum as addictive as “mugwump jizzum” (whatever that was) to ensnare bitches in your manly thrall, bend them to your will, hugging your leg naked like Frank Frazetta (whoever he was).

 

Mitch immediately ordered a whole case.

The drums deepen, their throats stretching beyond the night and into realms unseen. You and the other survivors are staked out on the ground, spread-eagle, before an idol shrouded in shadow. There is dancing, the women are naked, and the men watch. It starts slow, sensuous, hips tilting and sliding, describing long arcs of desire, weaving a cursive tale of anticipation, release, and rebirth. The last thing you want is to be erect, yet here you are—life seeking any way out of your body before it perishes in the dead end of your corpse.

 

The shaman is spinning, teeth flashing in the firelight, dipping his finger into his ghost pouch and wiping the black paste into everyone’s eyes. You struggle, whipping your head back and forth as he approaches to touch you, but he is patient and experienced and gets you in the end. The stuff burns and you cry out, a sound mimicked by the dancers, who now mount you and the other men, pinning you all down with their weight and riding to the increasing tempo of the drums. You try to think of sweet Christ and your wife, but this is like nothing you’ve ever felt before.

 

The good news, at least, is that they worship a fertility goddess.

By God, the results were real. Mitch’s cock was legend, Betty couldn’t get enough of his cum, and after he blurted the secret during a particularly Olympic doggy-style fuck she was hell-bent on drinking some SPIDERBLOOD herself.

 

“The label says it’s for men only,” he countered.

 

“Pfft,” she scoffed, “there’s nothing in here that women can’t handle. ‘Ovolactin’?  That doesn’t sound very masculine. Gimme.”

 

He relented and she cracked the man-sized can, enormous in her hands, and took a tentative sip.

 

“Well?” asked Mitch.

 

She smacked her lips. “Tastes like—” Suddenly, she chugged the entire can like a pro, crushed it in one hand, executed a flawless free throw into the trash, gave a lusty belch and wiped her mouth on the back of her forearm. “Tastes like... starlight.”

 

Starlight, as in the embers of the Big Bang igniting. And from that moment on she fucked like a man, they all did, every woman who downed a can, taking what they wanted, done when they were finished, ghosting the men who got weird or needy about it.  

 

“I didn’t buy you dinner so you couldn’t eat my pussy, slut,” she said after a particularly fraught meal. “You’d best warm up that tongue of mine.”

 

But Mitch was so very tired, and like many other men in the Milwaukee Metro Area he was learning that having a woman who fucked like a man was nothing like the fantasy at all.

Frenzy. Now you know the frayed edges of the word. The drums are almost a solid drone now, the starlight above remote and searing. You come for the fourth time with no refractory period, somehow keeping up, but feeling like something vital is being milked from you with each terrifying orgasm. The women are fucking like they won’t be happy until you ejaculate the blood from your broken pelvis.

 

The good news, you remind yourself again, is that they worship a fertility goddess—

 

That’s when the shaman, capering madly, ignites the big bonfire before the shadowed idol—

 

You see it then, firelit in all its glory, and gasp, your open mouth instantly filled with tongue from your current rider. Your eyes are wide and white as you stare around her joggling head.

 

The good news is that they worship a fertility goddess.

 

The bad news is that it’s not one of ours.

 

This, this is why the tribe is quarantined by the UN. Not because they’re some kind of precious remnant of what we once were, but because as long as someone’s worshipping, SHE doesn’t come looking for why the worship stopped. The idol in the firelight, stark against the cold black of the sky, so many limbs and mouths, a spider god with tits.

Betty was home again, coming in through the second-floor window as was her habit now. Mitch had learned to give up on hope, as Betty always made it back just as the paralytic began to wear off. She was wet with the semen of pretty much every man within her hunting perimeter, lending a whole new meaning to the term “body count”.

 

“Let’s get you up,” she cooed as she cracked a can of SPIDERBLOOD, downed it, and regurgitated it into Mitch’s slack mouth until it gushed from his nose. The tingling in his fingertips subsided and he fell perfectly still but for his wide white eyes and throbbing cock.

Just when you think you can’t take any more, and you feel the edge of madness peeling back to offer you an escape route, the chopper breaks the tree cover like hunter-of-stars, its great black wings thudding the air in everyone’s lungs. The naked beach people scatter like feral cats among the whipping embers of the blown-out fires as grim-faced mercs snot-rope down and lay overwhelming covering fire into the wind-savaged vegetation. They cut you free, no hesitation at your majestic, glistening erection, and hustle you into a harness. As you rise, dumb and stunned above the fray, you see them walking from staked-out man to staked-out man, putting two rounds into the head of each.

 

Rupert Goatshank, hazmat-suited billionaire, greets you inside the red-lit womb of the chopper. “Did you get it!” he screams over the racket.

 

You gesture weakly to your tear-streaked, black-smeared eyes. Goatshank snaps his fingers, and his medical team holds you down and plucks your eyes out with near-surgical precision. They roll you out the door, blinded, and you fall away from the cacophony into a padded silence. You hit the ground and the world presses your breath from you, but not your soul. You live long enough to find out that for such a small tribe, they sure do know how to butcher people—proving their shared humanity after all.

The scintillating corpse of Ronald Reagan couldn’t believe what he had just witnessed: Nancy drinking three Secret Service agents dry before vanishing into the air ducts of the White House. Even now, barricaded in the Oval Office, he could hear her scrabbling around up there, getting closer.

 

“Sir, there’s no time,” said the gore-steaked agent with the folding Uzi, “you must order the orbital strike on Milwaukee.”

 

The reanimated Gipper looked more confused than usual. “Milwaukee?  Why Milwaukee?”

 

“Because—” said the agent as Nancy burst from a vent and enfolded him, dragging him backwards, screaming, through the too-small hole.

 

This, this was the precise moment Betty finally found the perfect corner in the basement—dark, cool, moist, a corner she could keep from predators, a corner with enough exposed brickwork for the eggs to adhere to. Listening to deeper whispers, she unzipped her jeans, peeled them off her hips, and assumed the position.

 

00 0000

000000 000

000 0000

 

The Gunch

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

 

I ~ Changing lives.

 

As the armored limo crawled into the nighttime trailer park on autopilot—each glowing hovel a temple to desperation nimbused in trash—the Gunch asked to be let out of the trunk to walk the route.  He told it no, and told the escort in the superfluous evening gown not to worry.  “I’ve been here before,” he said, “and I’ll be here again.  They’re always happy to see me.”

 

He left the armored limo for the warm night air, into the orange buzz and dangling wires of lights on tilted poles, each one an undulating insect-cloud lollipop.  The happy one this time was another girl, rising from a cracked plastic picnic table in a sweep of just-right hormones, distorted tank top and short shorts shouting the promise of big, healthy babies—and her face, that essential organ of humanity, the reflecting pool of the soul—her face was curled with the spirals of the Golden Ratio, 237 precise data points, the perfect dance of glabella, ereborum, philtrum, mentolabial sulcus, the Smith-Creston Line, etc., etc.  This was a face women would emulate and men would brawl for, a face that would pad both their bank accounts.  She was an absolute outlier here, perfectly positioned for life-changing commerce.

 

He popped the trunk remotely and the Gunch unfolded all eight feet of itself in sinuate blue steel curves and neon tubing, vaguely man-shaped, with a thick, ribbed neck ending in a lamprey’s mouth—a wide ring of molecular teeth burring around a seeking, pulsing disk of rainbow light.  It approached the girl with eerie mechanical grace, its stride as easy as an Olympian, feathers of liquid nitrogen enrobing its otherworldly form.

 

“Will this—?” the question died as the Gunch gently took her shoulders in padded Mickey Mouse hands, bending down to meet her wide-eyed gaze, her angelic countenance glorious in the glitterrays of the hypno disk, the color wheel spinning deep in its whirring mouth.  She went under almost instantaneously, the same moment the thing struck like an ambush predator, a blink, really, faster than pain, that bit off her face and craniofacial bones to the brain and gaping nasopharynx, her tongue a dangling exclamation point over the lack of jaw.  Without the loss of a single drop of blood, her missing face was swapped for a porcelain doll’s dinner plate, complete with vocoder and tearless compound eyes, punched into place with a definitive chunk.  The Gunch swallowed, carefully shifting the treasure to its refrigerated chest.

 

“I—I feel... amazing,” she crackled in a voice that wasn’t hers, but nonetheless focus-grouped as “relatively pleasing”, slurred by the wave of drugs just now crashing over the stone of her brain.

 

Her phone chirruped in her pocket.

 

“The money’s in your account,” he said.  “This interaction is concluded.”  He pivoted and walked back to the armored limo where the Gunch folded itself into the trunk while he slid across cool leather into perfumed air, ears popping slightly as the foot-thick door twisted itself shut.

 

“What was that all about?” asked the escort.

 

“Everybody does what they’re paid for,” he said, guiding her head into his lap.

 

When he was done, he ran the back of his fingers over the soft heat of her cheek.  “You’re so pretty,” he said.

 

 

II ~ Possible side effects.

 

Beautiful rich people, it turns out, don’t always make beautiful babies—the genetic do-si-do is rife with clumsy stumbling, though even the worst dancers can occasionally slide with grace, if only for a moment before kissing the floor.  In a weird reciprocity, sometimes ugly people made a stunner.  A Venus from sea foam.

 

So, what to do?  Plastic surgery meant that it wasn’t so much your mom that made your dad blow his load, but the surgeon’s sinuous scalpel lines, making the ugly horrific with gaping flaps of raw-sided flesh, then Frankenstitching the whole shebang back up into a scrotum-tingling shape over old bones. Denude what’s left, paint the dodgier bits in the optical illusion of makeup, drape it in hasty couture, and most ape-brained billionaires will see the unplanted field of fourth-wife.  Not initially, of course; third-wife hasn’t been cleared out yet, and we’re only just now in the bathroom pants-down/skirt-up. You don’t get a mom and dad duo until after lawyers.

 

And the stuff that comes in pills and cans? Nu-Ü™, Rejovial™, and Slinkshifter™?  They were likewise less-than, for it turns out that beauty actually is more than skin deep—you need the underlying structures, in situ, intact.  And so, the Gunch.

 

Beautiful poor people would always sell, and the ugly rich were always buying.  The difference between what one would accept and the other would pay was where he lived.  And that difference was very large indeed.

 

As the armored limo pulled up to the red carpet he could see satisfied customers in the straining crowd—prosthetic faces as still as stones glinting in the lights, and yet others entering the luxe venue whom he knew (but would never tell), their faces just as bright but lit from within by genuine human emotion—smiles, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes.  There wasn’t an ugly person for miles.

 

Before he could cycle the door, the Gunch demanded to be loosed—the thing about the Laws of Robotics is that if you substitute the generic “human” for a very specific one, the machine becomes much, much more useful.  This was, the Gunch informed him, a complex security environment that required a robust threat-mitigation posture.  He acquiesced, and the Gunch prolapsed out of the trunk to gasps and applause.  The attention of the crowd shifted and the Gunch took note of exactly everyone who wasn’t watching.

 

He stepped out into the lights and crowd cacophony, waved and posed, shook a few milk-drinker’s hands, turned and began to walk the carpet—

 

She was saying something as she pulled the pin and the spoon twanged into the night—croaking it with a staticky vocodor clearly on the fritz.  The Gunch palmed her head and folded her in half over the grenade, landing in a superhero pose on one knee, the other arm flared for emphasis, so it went off with a wet WHAP that left a Gunch-shaped gore-shadow precisely where he was standing.

 

This is the third one this year, he thought as he stepped around the mess.  I really need to get someone to tweak the feeds and flatten all this stupid rage into simple despair.

 

 

III ~ Something like justice.

 

And so it was for the march of many, many decades, where mundane maladies like cancer and dementia were turned aside by money like an urchin’s stick before a fencing master.  Assassins rose and fell.  Lives were bought, sold, and spent.

 

The goal of standing on the pyramid of bodies was to reach heaven’s backdoor, to pop the seal and grip the threshold and haul oneself through into immortality—but in the end this was a Death universe, with entropy the only reliable principle, the slowly attenuating echo of the single-note dirge of the Big Bang.  Here, Death’s grip slipped but reluctantly, and only for maximum comedic effect.

 

So the very few spent their trillions on capital-f Forever—but it turned out uploading your consciousness into machines just made insane copies that were little more than brief entertainments, while genetic remedies essentially did the same, only with more screaming and poop murals.

 

This is the part where you get ready for the ending, the ironic twist where through some comic-horror miscalculation the Gunch takes his face, or his blood-slick hands slip on the ladder of ascension and he falls so long and far that he passes the starting point like an anvil in a suit coat, flash-fluttering into a deep, obliterating obscurity...

 

But that’s not what happened. What happened was he continued to profit from misery, going to the places his paymasters dared not go, and dangling the carrot of the short-term before the shortsighted, making careful investments, sending his kids to the best schools, and so on and so forth until they could afford to pay a younger version of himself to reap the desperate for perfection.  His kids were rich and beautiful. 

 

On his deathbed he looked back at the things he had done and felt nothing particularly troublesome at all. 

 

 

•

Mostly Skin

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

When you bite a wiener, you’re tasting history. 

 

The Ambiguous Meat Company was founded in 1862, a time when the intersection of hungry customers and freshly slaughtered meat scaled simultaneously—but without a market intermediary to yin-yang the flesh-to-cash flow.  Ambiguous Meyer, the son of Puritans, slotted himself into the gap in a way that would have made his ancestors simultaneously proud and flagellent—and secured for himself a position as one of history’s most ruthless Gilded Age barons, not just rich, but piss-on-the-president’s-head-while-laughing fuck-it wealthy.  Meat was money.

 

In order to compassion-wash his notorious and brutal excesses, Meyer commissioned an infinitely swappable mascot—the Meat Maiden—to peddle his sausage.  The original was a comely young woman driving a placard-clad donkey cart; she was armed for obvious reasons, a shroud of innocence with bodice blades.  As time marched forward, the cart became motorized, and the mutable young woman, swapped out whenever the “young” descriptor seemed strained, was armed with ever bigger guns.

 

And so the Ambiguous Meatmobile was born—a great Peyronic tube arched achingly upward, blood-red and nestled into the bun of a fat-tired chassis, with a horn that sounded like scream-yodeling.

 

In 1917, the Meatmobile was decommissioned and donated to the war effort, where it was up-armored, mounted with guns, and driven straight into the mouth of Hell.  The Huns quickly branded it Der Teufelwurst and were known to flee positions when its hungry treads churned the mud and corpses of no man’s land.

 

It was back on the streets for the Roaring ’20s, with an Art Deco facelift and a louche flapper behind the wheel—and something like a speakeasy operating out of the toilet stall.  But it wasn’t until the 1930s that we got the familiar meat whistles, the “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!” stickers, and newborns getting free rides home from the hospital.

 

Officially, the Meatmobile was scrapped for World War II, but all they really did was lop the wheels off and put wings on it instead of melting it down into firing pins and grenade dimples.  Now she was a heavy bomber, flying over 214 missions, each swastika dotting her nose a terrible story, either banal, or nonsensical, or genocidal.  She was at all the big ones—including Dresden, and, yes, even Berlin—chewing through crew with shrapnel teeth and gaping metal mouths in her hull.  While very few survived her—being rotated out after 35 missions—no ball turret gunner ever made it back.  They’d invariably lose contact with the cockpit during the scrum, voice lost in the engine drone, the chatter of guns, the thump and gravel-on-a-tin-roof rattle of flak.  And in the end, the ball gunner was dead in a butcher’s fishbowl, or dead with their oxygen hose wrapped around their neck, or dead for no clear reason—or just plain gone.

 

She did have one crash landing in Belgium, the whole shebang on fire, the ball gunner calling out their emergency descent, a decent-enough replacement for the shattered altimeter:

 

“Boys, seriously, you need to get me out of here.”

 

and

 

“Why isn’t the gear down? I’m seeing fucking trees!”

 

and

 

“OH GOD OH GOD OH MOTHER—”

 

When they hit, everyone, including maybe the ball gunner, expected the turret to just get pushed back up inside, but this bit of gear was designed by a 4-F bed-wetter with a face that never made a woman think of locomotives, ever, so it was the most robust turret carriage in the entire war, theoretically able to bear the total weight of the aircraft proper during a crash landing.  The ball gunner’s final scream got pinched into a racing stripe and a wet flap of hair on the tail.

 

After the war, the fuselage was recovered from a mothball facility in Arizona and repurposed back to mascot and marketing duties—but all they really did was lop the wings off and put wheels on it, leaving the yoke, the throttles, and the bomb bay doors.  And while she was still mildly radioactive from when she nuked Berlin, a couple coats of red ‘n yellow lead paint fixed that right up.

 

And that’s pretty much it until today, outside of a few covert scrapes during the Cold War, some secret nuclear stuff, and that one time in the 1990s when the Meatmobile was briefly used to transport Olmec heads to a hasty dump site—but the less said about that, the better.

 

Right now, the Meatmobile was pegging 140 miles-per-hour on I-84 near Boise with at least five police APCs and a technical made from an ’85 Subaru BRAT and an Ebay’d Russian anti-aircraft gun in hot pursuit.  The current Meat Maiden, whose dainty foot was putting the pedal to the metal, was Madison, and if you knew her, none of this would surprise you.  Just ask Lionel, her co-pilot.  He’s terrified out of his mind, but not the least bit surprised.  (Technically, he was her third co-pilot—the other two had been completely fucked out, eyes gone dead like old whores—but Lionel had staying power, and a farmboy bod complete with horse cock and a thresher-accident IQ.)

 

Madison’s specialty was reverse cowgirl—the lazy man’s doggy style—so she could just “grind dick without the stupid face.”

 

“I don’t bend like that,” Lionel panic-barked the first time.

 

“The hell you don’t,” she replied over her shoulder, pelvising his dick in half to rub her G-spot.

 

When it was clear she was done, he asked the dumbest question of his dumb-question life:  “What about me?”

 

Madison sneered.  “Finish it like your mom does.”

 

Lionel didn’t know about the look in his eyes, the utter devastation of This is my girlfriend? welling above his cheeks, but Madison sighed like she just smelled a dirty diaper, wadded up her red ‘n yellow polyester jumpsuit, pressed it into his face and finished him with a gorilla grip handy that would confuse him for the rest of his life.

 

If Lionel had a thing for Meat Maidens (and who didn’t?), Madison had a thing for the Meatmobile itself.  The Meatmobile made Madison horny; she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, it wasn’t that she wanted to fuck the Meatmobile, or be fucked by something like the Meatmobile—she wanted to fuck in the Meatmobile, to embody the matryoshka dick mantra of the sticker:  “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!”  She liked Meat Maidens just fine (and who didn’t?), every last one with the innate predator’s balance of a Russian gymnast, and that jumpsuit with the big zipper, you can slide right out of it and clean it up with a hose—but it was the cockpit that called to her.  Even though most of the history was occulted—forgotten or spun—she knew in her bones that piloting the Meatmobile would be like strapping yourself to an angel’s sword.  And she would do anything to get herself there.

 

On the first day of tryouts, when asked her name and little bit about herself, she addressed her cohort bluntly.  “I’m going to fuck all of you.  And not with my pussy.”

 

Sassy from Alabama made a tattletale face, cocked her head and raised her hand.  “Shouldn’t that disqualify her, Mr. Bun General?”

 

The Bun General, resplendent in his shaggy epaulettes and medals from at least 14 wars, considered this.  “No,” he replied to incredulous gasps, “I want to see how this plays out.”

 

It played out with elbows to the face at the finish line, laxatives in the cupcakes, pantsing on the ropes course, fake letters home.  Madison climbed a big fat pile of broken bitches to get into that seat.

 

So now you’re thinking that this high-speed chase near Snake River Canyon on I-84 is all Madison’s fault—an angry eight-year-old who didn’t get a sticker, a girl who knew how to throw a punch, a young woman who fucked like a man in the sense that she took what she wanted—but really this is all about Nazis.

 

Nobody knew the rented panel truck at the railroad crossing was full of Nazis—well, I mean the Nazis knew, but it’s not like it was a Nazi truck (though I suppose any truck full of Nazis is a Nazi truck), it was just a random rental from a company with a happy name and a cartoon pangolin mascot, though most people have no idea what a pangolin is, much less a cartoon one.  So that whole pangolin bit was a waste of time.

 

Nobody knew it was full of Nazis—but the Meatmobile sure did.  It could smell the stench of the camps inside their skulls.  And so when she pulled in behind the truck as the red ‘n white striped gate arm came down and the bells dinged and the lights flashed Madison may have set the brake, but the Meatmobile lurched forward three feet and kissed bumpers.

 

The thing about trains, they may look ponderous—dodgeable, even—but they are furiously working the mass side of the equation like a moon bending an orbit.  They come over the horizon in an implacable arc, sloppy to the brim with a king tide of inertia, and being magnanimous, are more than happy to share a little bit of that with you.  Vehicles evaporate into clouds of fist-sized debris.  Bodies come apart at the major joints, mostly just a burst of torsos and spinning limbs.

 

The truck vanished.

 

The Meatmobile slewed sideways, scraped hard down one side, and then the train horn was doppler-blasting into the distance.  At first Madison felt stunned, then awful when she saw the arm pinwheeling against the sky, a feeling that downshifted into a merely queasy “huh” when she saw the swastika armband.  She wanted to do the right thing and pull over and maybe vomit, but the Meatmobile wanted to go go go like this was mission 215 and it was ready for motherfucking takeoff.  She was plugged into it and it was plugged into her.  The sensation was crazy, as if the dainty foot that floored it was wearing a discarded Auschwitz shoe.  The Meatmobile’s tires screamed smoke at the asphalt and she took off down the road with a mean shimmy, speedometer seeking that peg.

 

Now, getting pulled over was something Meat Maidens were trained for—take your foot off the gas, signal, let the Meatmobile bleed speed gradually as you drift to the shoulder.  That gave you time to grab a couple stickers and take the safety off your drop gun.  Most just wanted the tour—but sometimes you had to show them why the Ambiguous Meat Company was still a going concern, horsemeat rumors (true) notwithstanding.

 

The cop waddled over, masked, swaddled and bristling with tactical bric-a-brac, each buckled piece a dime-store confidence, another mile between suffering and the retina of his soul.  

 

Madison made a stern face at Lionel, hand-signaled for him to stay the fuck out of it, and popped the hatch.  The steps extended with a hiss, and she exited the vehicle stickers-first.

 

“Ma’am, why are there a bunch of swastikas and a lady leg on the Meatmobile?” asked the cop.

 

“We-ell,” Madison drawled as she tugged the zipper ring on her jumpsuit from ticket to warning to no ticket to waistband, “the better question is, ‘what’s that behind you?’”

 

And BOOM.

 

There was a number to call—or tap out, actually, on the Meatmobile’s telegraph, the only piece of original equipment from 1862—a number that would summon vast corporate energies to warp reality itself, making things disappear while conjuring others; lives erased or enriched, depending on how gullible and useful one was.  In the end, all was meat, and meat was money, in an endless, recursive loop.  

 

Lionel had done as he was told and dutifully tapped out the number, but if the current situation was any indication, this band of sting-crazy cops had yet to get the memo.  In addition to the six chase vehicles, they had set up a roadblock ahead, complete with a tow vehicle to capture their prize—and some genius, Madison noted, had already put the tow platform down at an angle in anticipation of the asset forfeiture.

 

While the APCs were exceeding their limits, Madison was nowhere near hers.  She switched the nuclear pile to manual, laid her hand on the tripartite throttle.  “We’re gonna make this jump,” she said.

 

Lionel blanched.  “Or die trying,” he squeaked.

 

Madison frowned and elbowed the emergency passenger safety harness release.  Lionel’s crash rig retracted into his seat like a startled monkey.

 

“Cowards go bareback,” she snarled as she feathered the control rods into a prompt critical excursion.

 

Normally, this power would be used to flash water to steam to drive an electric turbine which would then crank the six supercharged Edison motors—but this was the goddamn Meatmobile.  Instead, the entire mustard magazine and septic tankage dumped straight into the nuclear pile itself, and, so energized, out the nozzle at the back in a huge blue-white blowtorch of pure hate that slagged the closest APC into a metal-vapor donut and spanked the Meatmobile forward with a spine-cracking surge.

 

At the dawn of the Nuclear Age there was this thing called “tickling the dragon”, where all you needed were six kilos of refined uranium and a screwdriver to play rock-paper-scissors with the Devil.  The goal was to twiddle things to see where the line of criticality was—how close you could get to a runaway, sustained reaction without going over.

 

When the infernal gambler with the screwdriver fucked up and the flash happened nobody said, “What the fuck was that?!” because they were all scientists.  But they were also hot dogs in a gas station display—tubes of meat rolling, rolling, rolling until they were cooked through—they just didn’t understand exactly what that meant yet.  Their skin would discolor, pucker and slough.  They would shed their hair and nails and humanity and enthusiastically shit their organs out both ends.  How long this took depended on where they stood when Satan crowed, “Always bet on rock!” and they saw the light.  Someone smart marked where their feet were on the floor with chalk so they could do some science when the suffering was done.

 

The Meatmobile hit the tow ramp and gunched down hard, burying the shocks and blowing at least one tire—then up, up, and away, Snake River Canyon small out the windows as Lionel starfished into the ceiling at the top of the parabola.

 

Down below, the technical screeched to a halt and Unidentified Cop Number Fourteen long-armed the cocking lever on the Russki gun, took the grips in fists and double-thumbed the triggers to light ‘em up.  The massive gun thudded a death beat, shell casings as big as dicks dancing everywhere.

 

Flak puffed into black stars all around the lurching Meatmobile, cracking windows and zipping bright spots of shrapnel through the crew cabin.  While Madison was trying to predict the landing, Lionel shit himself.  But the Meatmobile was a creature of war, and the haphazard shots were like the taps of a Shinto shrine maiden, waking the awful Pokémon within—Enola Gay uses BONE SHADOW: it’s super effective!  The Meatmobile ripple-fired the explosive bolts on the undercarriage where Greatest Generation mechanics had merely folded her wings so they could get to the “drink ‘n forget” part of their day—and something beneath the toilet, curled and withered... stirred.

 

Silver wings unfurled even as the flak ate holes in them, the whole affair juddering with tenuous, gut-queasing lift—but the Meatmobile was more comfortable in the air after all, and deadlier there, too. Madison could intuit the exo-atmospheric mid-course kill envelope; she could feel the engagement solution.  Comms crackled.

 

“Pilot,” wheezed the mummy under the toilet, “give me a fifteen-degree roll to put me on target.”

 

Madison brought the Meatmobile over, and the Last Ball Gunner engaged the clusterfuck of APCs with his twin fifties.  A rolling wave of dust puffs turned to sparks as it overtook the APCs, blowing tires and punching holes and knocking people to pieces.  The technical was obliterated and the flak stopped.

 

But the damage was done.  The Meatmobile was leaking every kind of fluid, some of them from what was left of Lionel, looking strangely serene and not at all surprised.  Madison fought the increasingly stiff controls as the horizon tipped and dipped and she realized she had never crash-landed a plane before—but by God, she was a fucking Meat Maiden, and she wasn’t going to be the one that lost the Meatmobile.  She worked on instinct, followed the machine’s lead, and lined up with the freeway just in time for the weirdly quiet glide before all hell broke loose.  Metal shrieked and she cracked her teeth and felt her kidneys in her hips.  Her spine did a weird thing she never wanted to feel again.  The Meatmobile ablated around her, shedding belly skin and sparking superstructure as she slid.  When she finally lurched to a stop, twisted head-down, Madison struggled out of her crash harness and crumpled into the asphalt.  She staggered from the smoking wreckage, her jumpsuit blackened and torn, face and hair streaked with blood, some of it hers.

 

The surviving cops were there, a startled arc of automatic rifles.  Nobody said a fucking thing.

 

The unspoken question:  Why didn’t they just shoot her?  Well, she was a white lady, and a Meat Maiden, to boot.  Trigger fingers were stayed by lifetimes of operant conditioning.

 

It was then that the last of the most important fluid drained from the battered Meatmobile.  No, not blood—reactor coolant.

 

It was a flash you could feel in your fluorescent teeth, one that made flesh transparent and tingled your bones.

 

“What the fuck was that?!” somebody said.

 

Madison took a deep breath, exhaled, and reached into her pocket.  “You should all hold still and use this chalk,” she said, a good-sized piece of it in her hand.

 

“Is it—is it magic chalk?”

 

“No,” she shook her head sadly for so many reasons, “it’s science chalk.  Because when this is all over, we’re gonna need to make some kinda sense out of it.”

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