Fiction

(first published by REDSINE print zine issue #1, 2000)

The urban sprawl of rush hour Los Angeles stretched out six hundred stories below her like the firefly infested surface of some enormous cesspool. From her window she would watch the mature ones transporting between work and home and she knew that one day that grid locked highway would be her interminable future.

Her name was Wendy and, like the girl in JM Barry's Peter Pan stories, she longed to fly. Escape the restrictive practices of honour and bigotry known on the west coast as The Fundamentalist Way. She longed for the east side with its bawdy tales of shotgun weddings, country roads and the communal joy of slum tenancy. Today was Wendy's bleeding day and the thought filled her with dread. A pre choreographed dread, you can bet your life.

Already this morning, she had downed three long glasses of purified Oil of the Olive Grove and still her little vulva throat was dry as the inhuman desert that encroached closer and closer each day on these super rich hi-rises.

Three Minutes To Go Body Clock sparked off her medulla oblongata as it had done every minute on the minute since her inception thirteen human years ago. And she had been hurting with every time check.

So turned on was she by Body Clock's regulated ministrations that she could, if she expended vast amounts of personal control trick the thing into time checking every ten heart beats. Every five. Every other. With deft synchronisation of her genital fingers, she could achieve the petit mort of outlandish literary reference, until the blinding bright white light moment of sexual hiatus tore across her nervous circuitry like a mischievous kitten on rice paper.

Wendy feared today more than any other ritual she had had to undergo in her secluded life. Feared the canary yellow reinforced door at the end of the corridor.

A curious, lactating sensation lifted from her right breast rib across her left clavicle and up the back of her neck; they would soon be here in their ceremonial garb. Knew all too well the vague flavour of the proceedings but not the ingredient, could taste the sauce but not discern the meat. She remembered whorry bedtime tales of being on the knees facing the proclaimed. The details from this point on always left to the imagination so as to put The Fear into active minds and solicit a purer and more original transformation. You wouldn't believe the pictures children paint.

Like in all good Shogun films, the door to her room slid open without her noticing. In swept two family members in ceremonial leaf green. A gold silk triple stitched motif on the breast pocket of their pyjamas she had never before seen. They took her by force. She was contractually expected to put up a brave fight. Off to the door. The canary yellow door which for the first time in her life stood ajar. Not fully open as such. Just improperly closed.

Dragged off against her will into the bleeding room. Lead lined walls thirteen meters high. A mirrored ceiling. Perforated cadmium floor. Wendy quickly scanned the room for the usual uplink outlets and psychoplasmic fittings so essential to high altitude residence. There were none. She had never before witnessed an atmosphere so cruelly anaesthetic. So clean in its architectural intent. This was indeed a room of worship. But of what?

She assumed the ritualistic centre of the room. On her knees. Facing the wall. Back to the closed canary yellow door as was the teaching. Millions of intercranials took place and briefly she lost count. Another gush of milky fluid up the inside of her left thigh indicated that Papa had entered the room. The canary yellow door silent but for the tiniest pressure differential that caused her inner ear to click disturbingly.

Wendy could feel the sonorous rumble Papa always gave off vibrate through her knees and her cold thighs. Think of goose flesh. As ritual decrees, he approached her from behind, took the gleaming orb of her shaven head and twisted her round, anticlockwise, one hundred and eighty degrees.

You could hear her knees squeak as she lost a few millimetres of skin on the perforated floor...the first of the bleeding acts. Papas crotch housed a meter long Katana. Erect and gleaming two hundred fold perfection. Razor sharp. Shoved it into her adulant face, breaking teeth as it entered, piercing her medulla oblongata silencing the pain.

A solemn moment. Then a wild orgasm of ritual maturity tore through her with such utter ferocity that her entire childskin blew right off. An explosion of gory flesh leaving behind a skull of purest gold.

Papa leaped onto her in a hacking frenzy and when he had finished, there lay on the floor a strange beast reminiscent of some glistening hake or seabass on the fisherman's filleting table. The floor helped drain away the excess carnage.

From the wreckage of this sinister annihilation a gold chassis gleamed, carbonized door panels were bolted on by invisible robot arms. The windshield was the smile of a child trapped in the occluded cornea of ancient history. Split fourway headlamps lifted from sheen of gold. The vacant lot under the bonnet where the V12 daydream may one day purr with soft undertones of menace. Contentment....

City of Angels, I heard one native call this place. At least that's how the virtually indecipherable lingo made it sound round all the guttural clicks and pops of pronunciation. It suited me fine to call this cesspool the City of Angels, the name sorta fit.

My new friend Henriquez Ramirez Giger, I call him HR for short, recovered from his mugging just as I expected him to roll over in the gutter and die. The sound of the muggers' heals a staccato chill in the golden haze of early morning. Remember the words he used,"the little beauty" when describing the thing I coughed up while JAZZING on the Quengo he had sent over to me at the bar we first met short days ago. That schizoform wrecked the joint.

Flesh cuban heals these muggers had. No arms. Over proportioned torsos taught with overstimulated musculature. No necks. No heads. Chameleon eyes in diamond formation, protruded from the torsal plateau. Each independent of its brother. Enormously long thighs towered over prehensile feet made of blue cheese that resembled the squared off appendages of orangutans. And for heals they had these revolting flesh cubans. Blocks of bone and gristle underfoot that raised the beheaded poultry drag queens onto their tippy toes as they wrestled HR to the floor, robbing him only of his artificial right arm and one of his nine pairs of canary yellow sunglasses.

I was helping him to his feet. Blood was dripping from a cut above his eye. Get down!—he hissed, hobbling for cover behind a parked vehicle. I got down.

What is it?—I asked, never a dull moment around HR.

So that's what this outrageous JAAAAAAZZ is all about...—he gzzt schtinged. Had the look of someone so totally caught up in the human symbiosis thaaaaang. I peered over the gold fender of the parked vehicle. Get your goddam head down!—he snapped.

I don't see anything. He pointed with his remaining arm. I only saw the prowling shadows formed by the gun metal formations rolling over this megacity with dolorous magnanimity.

The Fundamentalist, Prohibitors of Aaaaaaaall—flitted his eyes and when he ground his back teeth the mastication muscles throbbed hypnotically. I guess I was already in love.

Then from the corner of my eye, I saw it. The Fundamentalist Way. And it was quite honestly the most perplexing act of imagery I have ever had to comprehend. Like when you first see a spider dart out of a shadow. Across the freeway that drew its ever moving cargo through the city, a disturbance in the living fabric of the hi-rise opposite. The crystalled foyer trembled with writhing substance.
We've gotta get outta here—cried HR caught behind enemy lines under hostile fire.

How the hell are we gonna... I turned to ask. Only to find HR on his side in the filthy gutter. Licking. You didn't hear me wrong. The S.O.B. was busy working away with his purple tongue on the underside of the gold coloured vehicle we had taken cover behind. He must have known what he was doing because the nether regions started to writhe and judder. A seam appeared in the side of the vehicle and a childish giggle widened it.

The foyer of the hi rise across the freeway had gone molten. The familiar wet shapes of swing doors, mock Doric column, marble floors and crystal panes of glass seven stories high rose up like a Tsunami and broke on the sidewalk. Throwing up four black predatory structures that resembled hardware stores folded inside out and animated by some malevolent enchantment.

Due to HR's glottic coercion, the seam in the side of the vehicle now resembled a gap toothed smile, man sized with a bit of a squeeze.
In you go, my lovely—rasped HR. Whoosh, in like Flynn. I scrambled into the moist aperture, taking in the heady carbolic aroma. HR brought up the rear. The light that permeated the shell was candy flavoured and this alongside the over powering scent of jock straps and wintergreen threw my mind into a leather boy fast frame of nausea careened into jealous fits of mustachioed need. HR asked me to unscrew his left leg at the knee as this was his personal mode of jump starting these Series Sevens. Instinctively, I screwed it into my sexless region where I had always suspected such a thing should go.

Oh, how I bayed and yapped and whinnied at the black sky of ignition. Its crude seduction started to drip, dripping, oiling us, the internal combustion engine. The perfect getaway. The vehicle turned over, giving a contented giggle of girl power, as I banged HR for all he was worth. Greased piston working cylinder as bacon flavoured oil sluiced out the back. The scrabbled texture of back flesh between my teeth as HR bent over backwards with his own toes popping out of his eye sockets as the gearshift crunched through the cycles. The climatic acceleration like a nitrogen star burst threw us into the cramped back passage and we were away.

The Fundamentalist fumbled like black coalhills across the freeway in pursuit of us. Cutting a swathe through the maddened rash of living sex machines homeward bound. Causing a massive Crash of living flesh and unctuous green lubricant that stretched for three quarters of a mile. Sparks of biomechanical indignation spat from the Fundamentalist foiled once again by the simple act of amoral treachery.

Comfortable in the back of our stolen sedan, HR and I revelled in the musky odours of the locker room, the slimy secretions of locomotion a-splutterin' and a-blubberin' from the living ceiling. The outer skin of our projectile pulled back to reveal an emerald dome of fractured crystal. The jaded sky rolled nonchalantly by. Our chauffeur introduced herself in V12 undertones as Wendy.

Wendy, the Renegade.