Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (15 page)

She listened to the sounds and remembered how Wade cornered her against the sink and yanked her baggy sweatpants down around her knees, bent her over the dirty dishes. His cock, knobby and brittle like driftwood, knifed into her to the root, though she was dry as Egypt, down there. She screamed into the porkchop-greasy water, and flies swarmed up out of the swampy scum. She screamed and whooped with no pleasure, but something deeper, the painful thrill of being needed, made it all right.

When he came, he shivered and let out a strangled growl and zipped up, disgusted with her again. He went all cold and sneered, shifting gears, changing games so fast she was speechless, frozen pulling up her soiled pants.

“Yeah, I got another bitch.” She mouthed his words as they came out of the tinny speaker. “She’s hotter than you, she’s cleaner, and her insides aren’t all fucked up, either. She can have babies, Vi, and she’s gonna have mine.”

If she could find a knife in the mess, she’d stab him. Her arms whipped out at him, and nobody was more surprised than she was, when they slapped and scratched his face. “You want to make babies, Wade? You want to make a baby with her? You can’t be a fucking father, you’re not even a fucking man, you—”

And Wade said, “That’ll be enough of that,” and threw her right out the door like garbage. Into the garbage, in fact, which had piled up outside their door for two weeks, his seed leaking out down her leg, dying inside her, circling her scarred, scraped womb like kamikaze pilots with shitty directions until the acidity of her inner tubes burned them all up.

Violet blinked away tears, watching Wade’s silhouette pumping at his cock. God help him, he was hard and whacking off at the impossible replay of his cruelty, but he was sobbing, too.

“Oh, Vi, baby,” he choked, “I’m so sorry—”

His hand froze on his dick and dropped it like it shocked him. “What the fuck…” he grumbled as he stared at a new scene.

The soundtrack regressed, sax flatulence, junkie-funk guitar and canned moans seeping through the wall.

“What did you see?” a woman rasped, lighting a cigarette.

“Nothing, mama,” a boy mumbled, and Wade’s broken whisper echoed him. Popcorn popped on a stove.

“He wants to watch TV, so you make yourself scarce.”

“But mama, it’s Monday Night Football night—”

She cuffed him across the right ear with her silver Cricket lighter clenched in her fist. He yelped and ducked away. The Jiffy Pop’s pregnancy came to term, swelling foil belly splitting open to ooze steamy popcorn kernels into the hungry stove flames. He rolled away from her kicking legs and ducked for the door.

“What the fuck, Ruth?” a bleary man’s voice came from the bedroom.

“You want to be his Daddy? You want the duty? No? Then
shut the fuck up
!”

The ghostly cathode light went murky as the screen before Wade became a mirror. The music changed, too, subsiding into a deep bed of whispers and moans, soft, edgeless cries as of a dozen girl-girl scenes playing at once.

Wade leaned forward to feed the slot more quarters, cursing his reflection in subsonic hisses, when Violet spooked and jumped back from the peephole.

On the screen, she thought she’d seen herself peeping through the wall, as if the camera in the booth had x-ray vision. But when she went back to the hole, her heart pounded as she saw that Wade wasn’t alone in the booth, and what was in there with him looked nothing like her at all.

Zoe grasped her shoulders, held her up to the hole. “This has to happen, sweetie,” she murmured in Violet’s ear. “He wants it, he needs it… and so do you.”

She looked again, daring it to be real, but it was still there, more
there
than ever. On the screen, someone rose up behind Wade, but she knew this was a trick, because nothing blocked her view. Wade stared into the screen, transfixed.

All she could tell was that it was a woman. She stood taller than Wade so that the screen cut off her head, but her alabaster body was so enormous as to defy the physics of the booth. Absurdly voluptuous breasts dwarfed Wade’s head, while her elephantine belly smashed and overflowed around his skinny, shuddering form. Her gyrating hips rutted against the walls and blocked the door. Her arms floated up and stretched out to the screen, shockingly dainty little hands reaching up to the thin film of glass that separated her from the flesh-and-blood Wade, all but claiming his stupefied TV ghost.

“Please, mama,” he wheezed, “please take me—”

On the screen, Wade closed his eyes and went limp as the arms closed over him.

In the booth, something rose up between Wade and the screen. It bloomed and swelled and enveloped him, the glow of the screen shimmering through its molten form as it filled out and became a liquid replica of the headless woman.

As it grew, Violet saw rancid white slime oozing out of every seam in the booth, all the spilt seed of a million meat-beatings conjuring itself out of the walls like ectoplasm at a séance, and congealing in #9 to form the Magna Mater.

Violet bit back a scream.

The liquid mother-thing took Wade in its arms and cradled his head. His sobs broke into seizures that she smothered in her mammoth breasts. She guided a dripping nipple to his mouth and he locked onto it for all he was worth, sucking convulsively like a newborn.

The milk soothed him, and he subsided in her arms, anguished cries subsiding, deflated into a fetal ball. His limbs sagged bonelessly as his belly filled.

Violet groaned and tried not to vomit. The thing grew still larger and rolled over Wade, oblivious, delirious, at the teat. His clothes peeled back, shredded, melted away. The thing rolled up onto the bench and settled down around him, his rigid cock swallowed by slithering mouths of fluid flesh.

He moaned loudly around the monster teat, but the thing flowed through his fingers and rearranged itself so breasts and belly lolled backwards, and he sat facing the oleaginous grotto of a sopping, cavernous vagina.

Wade uttered a piercing infant’s whine and leaned back from the maw. Her cyclopean thighs clenched him and drew him in deeper, like food going down an esophagus into a bottomless stomach. Finally, Wade gave in and put his face into the gaping, flowery mouth of her sex.

Violet’s revulsion spilled out over her lips, and she threw up on the box of domination supplies between her feet. Through her tears, through hot flashes of an oncoming faint, she could not stop looking.

As the thing lowered itself onto him, Wade leaned face-first into her, and she parted, unhinged, like the mouth of a python to kiss, then devour him. The puffy, prehensile labia closed over his whole head, then flexed and strained to gobble up his shoulders, chest and abdomen.

Violet shoved Zoe back, ran to the booths. Lupe stood before #9, but stepped back when she saw Violet coming fists-first to save her husband. Violet grabbed the skeleton key from around Lupe’s neck and jammed it into the door. The Occupied light still glowed above, but she could hear nothing inside—no music, no moaning, no Wade. She threw open the door and lunged inside with her fists cocked, but the booth was empty.

“No! No, goddamit, Wade! Where are you, baby?” She whirled on Lupe and the approaching Zoe. “Bring him back, you bitch! How dare you judge him—”

“We don’t judge, here, sweetie,” Zoe said. “We just help them get where they need to go. Take another look.”

Violet looked inside the booth again, eyes straining in the dim half-light. All she saw was a pile of rags on the bench—Wade’s clothes. They were no dirtier than when he came staggering in, but they were all torn and wet and wound up into a tight, owl-turd bundle that stirred as she came closer. Stirred and gave a tiny cry.

“
Her
people come for the ones nobody claims,” Zoe whispered in her ear. “Why don’t you go home early, sweetie? He’s beautiful, now, and he needs you.”

Violet stumbled and bumped into the remaining saloon door on her way out. She didn’t even notice Crayonne holding the front door open for her as she wandered out into the night cradling her newborn baby.

When the time came for a serious inventory of the soul, some people prefer a secluded beach, the woods, or the relative isolation of a city rooftop; but for Leo Knobloch, there was no place more conducive to deep rumination than the trunk of a strange car.

When Leo “Lo-Ball” Knobloch woke up in the trunk of a car, most who knew him would say it was the start of a good day, because at least he’d slept indoors. Then they would wonder aloud where said car might be found, and ask you how much money Lo-Ball owes you.

But they—and you—would be shit out of luck, because said car was moving fast with no witnesses, and Lo-Ball had, as usual, not a cent on his person.

He also had no idea how he came to be in the car. He felt like he’d slept with his head in a paint shaker, but he didn’t remember drinking. Knobloch only drank when he was winning, and since Lady Fortuna was perpetually on the rag for him lately, it was a safe bet he wasn’t hung over.

A tender joy buzzer on his mostly hairless dome told him someone had sapped him. Probing it with the plaster cast on his right hand did neither his head nor his broken fingers any good. Whoever hit him must now be escorting him somewhere, most likely for an audience with one of his legion of debtors.

Or maybe he’d just pissed someone off. Always a dark horse on the outside rail, pure cussed bad luck had stalked Leo Knobloch since the day of his birth, when he caught herpes from his mother coming out of her chute (and passed it onto the nurse who weighed him), and his father botched cutting the umbilical and severed his own thumb. Born under every known astrological system’s baddest of bad signs, Leo was a veteran professional gambler, though the only real money he’d ever won had come from trading on the fear he inspired as a legendary loser.

Leo felt around the hot, sparsely carpeted floor of the trunk for his lucky hat, which had fallen onto his head out of the gray, rainy sky at Disneyland (having blown off the head of a forty-two year old man, also named Leo, who suffered a fatal heart attack while riding the Matterhorn), but it was nowhere to be found.

Surely, if they left it behind, these bastards could not be professionals. Even if you had no regard for the cherished personal possessions of others, you had to at least try not to leave evidence around. His name was already embroidered on the brim, but he suspected the fickle camp hat with Grumpy, the sourpuss dwarf from Snow White on the front, was already luck-wrangling for another bum, somewhere.

Likewise, his lucky toupee, which was also missing. He won it off the head of a Vietnamese grocer in a low-ball poker game at a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Reno, and though his own native hair was curlier and several shades lighter than the original owner’s, he wore it everywhere, especially at the pai gow parlors where he ran his bread-winning grift. Asians took luck seriously, and the sight of a shabby
quiloc
waggling his sandy brown eyebrows at you with the trophy-scalp of a fellow celestial draped on his skull was enough to make any pragmatic gambler toss him a few chips to go away, even if they didn’t know his reputation.

But everyone in this town who turned cards, threw dice, played ponies or made books for a living knew Leo Knobloch, and they hated him like cancer. Locked out of every legitimate gambling venue—and welcomed with knives and baseball bats at all the rest—Leo had to hunt for action.