Doa Ii Page 16

  “You’re not gay are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then why’d you let me kiss you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  He laughed and we started hanging out and the teasing increased.

  Jason was the one who encouraged me to join the chess team and the Creative Writing Club and introduced me to his D&D group. I was still fending off aggressive recruitment from the football and basketball coaches. I told them I’d never even watched organized sports and found them boring and barbaric. I only worked out because I lived in a bad neighborhood and having big muscles was an easier way to avoid becoming a crime victim then carrying a gun or joining a gang. Finally, they stopped bothering me about it. They would pass me in the halls and give me looks of pity and disgust. Their expressions said: “What a waste.” I knew they were right, but I liked what I liked and that was Jason and D&D and my chess club buddies.

  Throughout high school I avoided the wild parties because there were drugs and alcohol there and I hated the smell of cigarette smoke and weed. I was known as Lionel Burger, the good-looking geek. That put me one rung above Katrina McClory, the emo devil slut, on the school social ladder.

  She rode along next to me for several blocks. I wondered what she would have thought of me now, thirty-four and single, driving a Toyota Prius and working as an editor at a weekly newspaper. She had blossomed into some sort of bad-ass, body-building, she-devil, while I remained the good-looking geek.

  She turned the corner from Market Street onto Haight Street and I found myself turning the corner to follow her. I hadn’t decided to do it. I was on autopilot. I followed her as she drove up Haight Street to the Lower Haight and parked in front of a coffee shop on the corner of Haight and Church. I parked directly in front of the place and watched her as she sat down and drank some sort of coffee that was covered in whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate. She was reading a magazine that seemed to be about latex fetishes with a cover that was almost pornographic. Somehow, despite her outfit and salacious choice in periodicals, she did not appear brazen or shameless so much as free. She looked completely free. I envied her.

  I sat there, watching her, for more than an hour. I watched her snatch up her smartphone when it had apparently rang or received a text message or an alert or something. She pressed a few buttons, smiled, then snatched up her things and hurried out of the shop. Curious, I followed her.

  She left her bike parked in front of the coffee shop and hurried down the street, staring at her smartphone like it was receiving some sort of signal and she was following it. I had read about smartphone apps that would alert you when someone you knew was nearby. There were even dating apps that told you if another single user who was compatible with you was in the vicinity. She reached an unmarked storefront with blacked out windows, rang the doorbell, then ducked inside. My curiosity was now on overdrive.

  I climbed out from behind the wheel of the Prius and followed her. There was a little silver plaque, about the size of a credit card, just above the doorbell. The plaque said “Halloween’s.” I rang the doorbell. A man covered in tattoos opened the door.

  “You by yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “Then it’s thirty bucks.”

  I paid the thirty bucks, not knowing what I’d just purchased. A service? Some sort of experience? Tentatively, I stepped inside a dark room that reeked of a strong disinfectant that was still not quite strong enough to mask the smell of blood and semen. Every instinct within me, primal flight or fight reflexes reacting to the smell of violence, told me to “Run! Flee! Save yourself before it’s too late!” Then I spotted Katrina walking down a long hallway with black walls and I followed. There were closed doors on either side of the hallway. Loud music blared from the speakers with bass so heavy it made my chest hurt. It had a driving techno beat and was full of moans and screams. It took me a moment to realize the moans and screams were not coming from the speakers. They were coming from all around me.

  What the hell is this place?

  Ahead of me, still staring at her cell phone, Katrina disappeared into one of the rooms. I crept tentatively toward the open doorway and paused, trembling. I took several deep breaths, looked back down the hallway at the door I’d just come through, closed my eyes, and prayed for guidance. As always, God, the cosmos, the life force, or whatever it was that people prayed to, was silent. I didn’t expect anything more. Praying was more of a habit left over from my devout Baptist parents. I tended to believe in the empirically verifiable. The chills racing up and down my spine and the trembling in my legs decided the matter for me. I turned to walk back the way I’d come. Then I heard Katrina’s voice. It sounded angry. Then another voice, deep and husky, moaning. I turned back to the door, which was still slightly cracked, as if she had known I was following and was inviting me to join her. I peered inside.

  I don’t know what I expected to see, some sort of orgy, an S&M scene, male prostitutes, whatever expectations I had before peering through that crack in the door shattered like a pane of glass in a hurricane when I saw the massive man, larger and more muscular even then Katrina, lying face down on a metal operating table with his wrists and ankles shackled to each corner, while Katrina knelt above him, anally raping him with a strap-on dildo that looked more like an elephant tusk than a phallus. It was curved and pointy, the length and girth of a child’s arm, at least two-feet long, and appeared to have been fashioned from ivory. The man had a leather hood over his head and Katrina had apparently put duct tape over the tiny zippered mouth-slit and the two nose holes. The husky moans I’d heard from outside, were his muffled screams. He was suffocating even as Katrina made a ruin of his lower intestines. Blood and lacerated hemorrhoidal tissue now covered the dildo/tusk. Katrina was thrusting with all her might, sweating profusely from the exertion. She drove her hips and pelvis down into the man’s muscular gluteus maximus, pile-driving the lethal sex-toy deep into the helpless bodybuilder, obliterating his rectum, coring it out with a hideous ripping, squishing sound, like someone juicing an orange. When she finally withdrew the ivory phallus from the bleeding ruin that was once an anus, half the man’s intestinal track appeared to come with it, along with an avalanche of blood and feces, erupting from his asshole like a volcano. My stomach revolted. I fell to my knees, vomiting uncontrollably.

  Katrina watched me, smiling with amusement while she unstrapped the dildo. She pulled out some wet naps and wiped smears of blood and feces from her thighs, doing the same to the dildo before tucking the thing back inside a huge purse she carried with her. I was still doubled over in the hallway. She stepped over me, slammed the door behind her, then knelt and lifted me to my feet with all the effort one might use to heft a Chihuahua into a Prada handbag.

  “Let’s go, Lionel,” she whispered and hurried me toward the front door. The guy who’d let me in and took my money was stomping down the hall toward us in long purposeful strides. She knew my name, knew who I was. How?

  “Did you just fucking throw up in here? Is that your vomit on my fucking floor? Jesus Christ! That smells terrible! You expect me to clean that shit up for you?”

  What he was smelling was likely what had boiled up out of the deadman’s rectum rather than the pound of liquified vegan offal I had just regurgitated. Together, we raced out of the door, past my little blue Prius, and hopped onto her tricked-out Harley.

  “How did you know my name? Where are we going?”

  I know. It was weird that those were the first questions to come to mind after watching her murder some guy built like a pro-wrestler by sodomizing him with a strap-on straight out of Lair of The White Worm. But I was afraid to ask about that. I was trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, trying to dismiss the possibility that I might be next. Because I still wanted to know her. More now than ever. I was terrified, mortally afraid, but the thought of never knowing why she’d done what she did, what else she was capable of, how she knew my name, and, most importantly, who this bea
utiful, seductive, Zaftig, murderess was, that would have been unbearable.

  She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled as she gunned the engine. The smile held the promise of pleasure, the threat of pain.

  “Hold on.”

  I pulled her close. She smelled like jasmine and roses and beer and cigarettes and sweat and sex and blood.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I remember you, Lionel. I never forgot you. I never forgot any of you.”

  She turned the corner, leaving Haight Street and shot down Church Street, headed toward the Castro District.

  “Where are we going?”

  She laughed.

  “Lionel?”

  “Y-yes?”

  “You still haven’t asked me why I killed that guy back there.”

  “I-I figured that was your own personal business. I mean, it-it’s none of my business.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be hanging with me, then my business is your business, right?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Katrina was grinding her sizeable ass against my crotch, which was responding with an erection that felt like it had drained half the blood from my brain.

  “So, what-what’s your business? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I kill people.”

  All the saliva dried up in my mouth. She said it so callously, so cavalierly, without the slightest hint of remorse.

  “For money?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Was that for money? I mean, what you did to that guy. Did someone pay you for that?”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  That made my mind spin. Someone paid her to fuck them to death with a dildo made out of a rhinoceros horn?

  “Why would he...why would anyone pay for something like that?”

  “It was his fantasy,” she replied with a shrug. “He had a fetish for dildos.”

  And that explained it for her. That was all she needed to know in order to rip a man’s guts out through his asshole.

  “You heard about that guy in Germany who met a man on the internet and let the guy eat him alive?”

  I nodded.

  “And that guy who killed himself by letting himself get fucked in the ass by a horse? He filmed the whole thing. I have a copy of it. It’s pretty sick.”

  I nodded. Of course she had a copy of it. Still, I could not imagine getting ass-raped by a Clydesdale being any sicker than having your insides ruptured by a twenty-four inch piece of ivory.

  “So, where are we going now?”

  “To see another client.”

  “How do you find them? I mean, how do they find you?”

  She handed me her cellphone. There were pictures of men and woman from age twenty to ninety complete with phone numbers, email and physical addresses. Above it were the words “Fuck Me To Death.”

  “It’s a new app.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Eros Morte.”

  “Sex Death?”

  She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

  “And this app does what? It finds people who want to be fucked to death?”

  She nodded. The whole thing sounded completely insane. I had a lot of questions, a lot of fears. I wanted to hop off the bike and run for my life, the same way I felt standing out in that hallway, listening to that big guy grunt and moan while Katrina rode him. But I was curious. This was so much more than the horrors I had imagined I would find in drugs or internet porn. This was completely over-the-rainbow.

  “Why would anyone want to die like that?” I asked. My voice had a desperate squeak like the timid voice of a bullied child.

  This time she didn’t turn around. She shouted her reply into the wind, over the ferocious roar of the Harley’s 1,340cc v-twin engine and it blew back into my face like the flaming ash and embers from a forest fire, yet instead of burning my eyes, her words burned away at the last sane notions of morality and humanity I was clinging to.

  “Most people live unremarkable lives. At the end, they want a remarkable death. If no one remembers anything else about ’em, they’ll fucking remember what I did to ’em.”

  It made sense to me somehow and that was the most terrifying thing of all.

  “What does this next client want you to do to him?”

  “Her. And you’ll see. You wouldn’t want me to ruin the surprise would you?”

  Even with her back to me, I could hear the smile in her voice.

  We pulled up outside an apartment building overlooking Market Street. Market Street was packed, as it always was. Well-groomed, athletically built men in tight blue jeans and tight, plain, white t-shirts paraded up and down the street amid the businessmen in shirt and tie, middle-aged men in brightly-colored polo shirts, hipsters, hip-hoppers, and leathermen. Similarly dressed women were interspersed with the men along with several large women in work-boots, overalls and wife-beaters. I had always avoided this part of town with its elicit bars and nightclubs and men in assless chaps. Now, I was excited by it. I knew Katrina was about to show me a side of the Castro I would have never been able to discover on my own, maybe a side I would one day wish I had never discovered.

  Knowing Katrina’s next “client” was a woman sent my mind down dark paths, imagining acts of horrific debauchery I would never have let myself entertain had I not seen what I’d seen in Halloween’s. Was she going to use that ivory dildo on a woman? I was surprised that the thought excited me as much as it horrified, but then, I was imagining a woman built like a supermodel, not the aging mass of plastic surgery scars that greeted us on the top floor of the apartment building.

  Despite what must have been a dozen different plastic surgeries, her face clearly marked her age as somewhere in her sixties, but her body had been remarkably well-preserved. She had huge fake breasts and an ass that had obviously undergone a Brazilian butt lift. It would have been lovely taken on its own, but attached to those over-tanned, wrinkled, emaciated thighs, they looked like the bags of silicone they were, as did her enormous mammaries.

  She was completely nude when she opened the door. Her face was so tanned it was a burnt orange, like fried bologna. And her lips had so much collagen in them they resembled two fat, red, slugs slithering across her mouth. Numerous facelifts had pulled her eyebrows nearly up to her hairline and her nose was almost non-existent, just two slits in her face. I stifled a scream, horrified by the hideousness of it all. With all the work she’d had done, I guessed she was probably closer to eighty than sixty.

  The woman regarded me casually, then turned and walked back into the apartment, heading for her bedroom. We followed, closing the front door behind us. The apartment was like nothing I could ever have imagined. Granite counter tops and marble tiles in a kitchen stocked with over-sized, stainless steel appliances, and dark cherry, raised-panel cabinets, dark cherry hardwood floors covered everywhere else in the apartment. All the light fixtures and door hardware were a dark, oil-rubbed bronze that matched the cherry wood floors. There were huge paintings on the walls lit with track lighting, clearly originals, though I couldn’t place the artist. Abstract swirls of red, pink, and tan reminiscent of Francis Bacon yet more lascivious. I could make out a breast, an ass, a vagina, a penis, and teeth in the splashes of red dripping down the canvas. The signature on the bottom of the piece nearest me said “Joseph Miles.” The name seemed vaguely familiar, but I had barely passed my art history course in college. I had only taken it because I thought it would be easier than World History.

  I was so preoccupied with the painting and the overall beauty of the woman’s apartment, that I didn’t notice the large zippered pouch Katrina withdrew from the big handbag she carried. Not until I followed her into the bedroom where she opened it up and laid its contents out on the floor beside the bed: knives, scalpels, pliers, and bone saws. I looked from Katrina to the woman who lay on the king-sized bed atop a sheet of 10 mil. plastic. She was in the process of self-medicating, jabbing a hypodermic needle into one o
f the thick, blue veins in her thighs. Her eyes rolled skyward almost immediately, the eyelids drooped. Every muscle in her body visibly relaxed and a smile crossed her face. Heroin, or something very much like it, I imagined. Though all I knew of such drugs was what I’d read in books or seen in movies. I had never witnessed anyone get high before.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  And Katrina went to work.

  I watched in horror as the massive woman took a scalpel to the old lady’s lips, slowly slicing them off her face, leaving only her brilliantly white teeth (obviously capped) beaming out from that burnt orange face. But Katrina didn’t leave her those either. She picked up the pliers and plucked the woman’s teeth, one by one, from her mouth. The woman moaned and grunted, but never screamed. Even when Katrina picked up one of the knives, straddled the woman’s chest, and began carving on her face, the old woman never screamed. I watched in horror as she lopped off the old lady’s ludicrously small nose.

  Katrina reached out and rubbed the woman’s over-sized breasts, tweaking the nipples a bit. Then she leaned down and sucked each one until the nipples were fully erect. She snaked her hand down the old woman’s lyposuctioned abs, down between her blue-veined thighs, and eased one finger then another and another into the woman’s hairless snatch. With her thumb, she rubbed the old woman’s clitoris.

  Katrina was remarkably deft in the art of pleasure, easily as talented in this skill as she was at torture and murder. What little I knew about female anatomy told me orgasm should have been impossible for the old woman at this point, yet the woman’s body began to respond, despite the immense pain she must have been in.

  “Fuck her, Lionel.”

  “Wh-what? Did you just say, fuck her?”

  “Yeah. I can’t get her off and cut her tit off at the same time. I need help and since you’re here. You’re going to pitch in. Take your cock out and stick it in her. It’ll make the cutting hurt less. Unless you want to take the knife?”