CHAPTER 24: ELEVEN YEARS DEAD
Ten jags of powdered coffee later, I'm back on my flophouse bed with a mad dagger in my soul. Perusal of the radio yielded nothing with a backbeat. The room smelled of spilled rum and synthetic coke, mildew and bat's piss. I'd paced the carpet until I'd left footprints.
Why had Suzy-Q and those two-bit punks vanished like dinosaurs in a tar-pit, and how could she have gone so wrong, so fast? And where did Natasha fit into the equation? I was sure she was dead. As dead as this planet I'd thought I could trip on, this extra-terrestrial void with a bad case of chicken malaise.
Polluted was Earth was though, my head was that much dirtier. I heard a sound like an Edsel hovercraft and a crash through the window brought my drunken reverie to a screeching halt.
A kid about eleven years dead was lying on my floor in a pool of blood and broken glass. He said from the speckled linoleum --
"Don't move or I'll blow your fukking gourd off! Gimme all your money."
"Money? I'm a cop."
"Then give me two tickets to the Policeman's Ball."
Every slacker's a comic on this godforsaken orb. I checked out his arms. He had track marks the size of golf tees and a homemade tattoo of E=mc2. The plot got so thick I could eat it on crackers.
"We're on the 99th floor, Pee-Wee. How come you're crashing my window party?"
"The Space-Lady gave me a shot."
"Space-Lady?"
"Yeah, she's really neat. She's got a pet midget and he made the whole Sunday School disappear!"
Faust, that little he-goat. I'd noticed when the kid had smashed through the window that something had fallen out of his pocket. I picked it up and peeped an ad for a show going on that night at Pederast's place, the Mars Bar. The poster showed a bunch of guys with pancake make-up and high heeled shoes on. I gathered that this was what they called rock 'n' roll now and it turned my stomach.
"You gonna make this freak scene, squirt?"
"Yeah, everybody's going. Everybody who's anti-body."
"Alright Tarzan, the stairs are out the door and to your left. Now scram."
"I'll take the elevator copper," he said dramatically, and dropped like a nickel balloon.
In space no one hears you scream. Of course, on Earth it's a little bit different. My mind drifted back to the end of the last chapter.
The Intercourse Barn? Be still my snaking hard.
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CHAPTER 25: THE INTERCOURSE BARN
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