Sex and Death in Television Town Read online

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I grew up in a smallish town in the middle of the desert. It was basically just a suburb twenty minutes outside of the Phoenix metropolitan area, but the people living there didn’t think of it as a suburb. They liked to pretend it was the Old West, and they were cowboys. These were the adults. The children were busy pretending to be transformers and thunder cats, and could care less about cowboys.

  The parents tried to get us to em- brace the history of the area, but we wouldn’t have anything to do with it, no matter how many times they took us to the Raw- hide amusement park, fed us ranch-style beans, and got our pictures taken in sepia wearing Old West costumes. Unless they gave cowboys laser swords we weren’t interested.

  I ended up getting into the Western genre years later, once I was introduced to the Italian westerns such as the Django series. There’s just something about Italian westerns that kick ass. Not as much as Italian horror movies, but pretty damn close. It was enough to get me inspired to write this Bizarro western, which seems to have turned out to be more like “Hell Comes to Frog Town” than anything else. But hey, that movie starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and he’s a damn fine actor. Didn’t you see “They Live?”

  You better have . . .

  - Carlton Mellick III 12/13/05 5:28 a.m.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The dildo is alive.

  She struggles with it, fights it, a penis-sized millipede squirming between her legs.

  “You can fuck it too,” she says, red-worming eyes at the young man sitting next to her.

  The woman: wiry nakedness, snakeskin pattern tattooed from neck to feet, enormous spikes down her spine like a metal stegosaurus.

  She has to curl forward to keep her stegosaurus-spikes from cutting the upholstery. Eyes glued to the boy. A tongue like red soup.

  There are six people crammed inside of this stagecoach. All on high nerves. Hot sweat in the air, sticky-stuffed together and this spiky snake woman keeps masturbating against them.

  The young man: Random is his name. Maybe twenty years old, but with a ten-year-old’s face. His head knotty with tension. His mouth wide open but there aren’t any words.

  He can feel the strange woman’s naked skin next to him, through his red velvet tuxedo. She vibrates against his body, steel moans from her reptilian throat, curly insect legs inside of her.

  His eyes diverting . . . Tries not to look, but she is slipping her violent flesh in and out of his mind.

  “They are getting closer,” says a man with a green-painted face, cleaning his pistols and distant-eyed out of the stagecoach window.

  Random refuses to look out of the windows. He can hear things out there. Things screaming and clawing in the distance. He can imagine them all over the landscape, scurrying through the black smoke. It is bad enough to see them in his mind.

  But the worst image his eyes are avoiding is seated across from him: Typi, his young bride, who is soggy and skeletal and makes him cringe.

  He remembers the sweet-sweet sixteen-year-old she used to be just yesterday morning, before all this happened, with her rainbow smiles and sunshine-colored hair. But now: puffy wrinkles, red bugged eyes, dreadlocked hair, her once-beautiful white wedding dress ripped into shreds and stained with mud and gore. She is frozen in her seat. Her brain completely numb to her new husband, to the people who saved her life. She doesn’t even realize the woman masturbating next to her.

  So Random focuses on his folding hands, rapidly folding and unfolding and wet.

  He has not met any of these people before tonight, but he has heard rumors of them. He knows that most of them are part of the vicious Crawler Gang. A group of renegade

  hermaphrodites that have been terrorizing innocent farmers and councilmen, wreaking havoc from the silver coast to the end of the world.

  Battle Johnny: (sitting next to Random’s wife) The leader of the hermaphrodite gang. He looks only like a man and not at all like a woman, though he has the sex organs of both genders. His breasts are barely visible through his boiled leather vest.

  The occupants of this stagecoach are all that’s left of the Crawler Gang. And all that’s left of the citizens of Jack- son City.

  “How many?” Battle Johnny asks the green-faced man.

  “I can see a dozen or so. Might be more behind them.”

  The masturbating woman gyrates faster. Excited with the gurgle-screams behind them.

  A voice from on top of the stagecoach: “Which way?”

  Battle Johnny’s stern-grizzled face at the spiky woman.

  “Almost . . .” the woman’s mouth bulging, furious strokes with the metal millipede, until she explodes into orgasm. Her legs stretch tight against Battle Johnny’s lap, fingernails digging into Random’s thigh and squeezing the shoulder of the thin girlish person seated on the other side of her.

  All her muscles are going loose and she drops her eyes shut.

  Battle Johnny grips her kneecaps. “Which way?”

  The woman grunts. She squirts the wiry insect out of her and then, with a wink to Random: cups her fingers, digs deep inside, and swirls out a handful of ejaculate.

  She brings the palm of goop to her face. Her eyes roll, flutter, as she brings the scent of her sex deep into her lungs, and goes into a trance.

  “What is she doing?” asks the green-faced man.

  Battle Johnny raises an angry finger at him. She drifts and sways. Dips her tongue into the slime and explores.

  The desert makes black earwig sounds.

  The woman opens her eyelids and with a butterfly voice she says, “. . . Telos.”

  The passengers jerk, her words like electricity jolting through their laps. One of them drops a gun.

  “Telos?” Battle Johnny asks her. “Are you insane?”

  She wipes her goo across Random’s red-velvet thigh. “Telos.”

  Voice on the roof: “Where to?”

  Battle Johnny stretches his rubbery neck out the win- dow. “Maulatin,” he says.

  “Maulatin, fine,” says the voice on the roof.

  “I said Telos!” the woman screams. Battle Johnny leans back, shakes his head. “The people in Telos are unpredictable. There’s got to be another place.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she says. “There is no other way.”

  “I am like God,” Battle Johnny says.

  CHAPTER TWO

  These are the characters:

  1) Random – A random young man.

  2) Typi – A typical young woman.

  3) Battle Johnny – leader of the hermaphrodite gang.

  4) Nixx – face painted green.

  5) Cry (a.k.a. Sex) – Reason for their survival #1.

  6) Jesus (a.k.a. Death) – Reason for their survival #2.

  7) Sharp – a girlish hermaphrodite.

  8) Oxy – a masculine hermaphrodite.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When they get to Maulatin it is in splinters, as dead as the past six towns. Riddled with skinless corpses and shredded buildings.

  Everyone jumps out of the stagecoach and darts to the fallen citizens, rummaging through their guts for extra guns and ammunition.

  Typi will not leave the stagecoach, her face white with sweat. Ghostly skeleton in a bride’s gown.

  “The horses are exhausted,” someone shouts. “They need to be replaced.”

  Random steps out of the stagecoach and wanders through sticky dirt. Hermaphrodites run around with lanterns getting food, supplies, hoping they don’t run into anymore survivors who need to be saved. They can’t spare anymore weight.

  The naked spiky woman finds clothes on a dead sheriff and tears off bloody strips of black fabric. She dres
ses — just barely, you can still see most of her breasts and crotch — by attaching pieces of cloth to hooks on her body.

  She licks her tattooed hands with a long snake tongue and sharpens her teeth on a stone.

  “I told you there’s nothing here,” she says to Battle Johnny. “We need to go to Telos.”

  “Cry,” Battle Johnny stomps on pieces of regurgitated human flesh at the half-naked woman, “I have been to Telos and I tell you it is not the right place.”

  Cry says, “They will help us. You know how to communicate with them. You can explain our situation.”

  Battle Johnny kicks a slimy skull across the dirt road. “You don’t understand.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” the green-faced man says to them. “The only city left between here and the end of the world is Telos. There isn’t anywhere else we can go.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Battle Johnny says. “Nobody has ever reached the end of the world.”

  Nixx, the green-faced man, shakes his head and returns to scavenging.

  “You don’t take my vision seriously,” Cry says. “Why did you bother busting me out of jail?”

  Battle Johnny raises his finger at her and then trudges through dead cowboys to the saloon.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Random is sitting on the ground with opal-button eyes. The girlish hermaphrodite wipes bush thorns from her buttocks and sits down next to him. She is like a thin awkward teenager. Her head is smooth bald but peppered with white scars. Small round glasses. Painted-on eyebrows.

  She looks at Random and says, “I was born backwards.”

  Random squints at her, then goes back to counting cactus shadows along the landscape.

  “They call me Sharp,” the girlish hermaphrodite says.

  She is both a man and a woman but since she is very girlish they address her as she. Just as they address Battle Johnny and the stagecoach driver, Oxy, as he, because they are both very masculine hermaphrodites.

  “We need to get moving,” says Oxy with red-scraggle sideburns, leaving the stables with bags of horse food.

  His accent is cruel and every word sounds like sarcasm. Random cringes when the man gleefully says, “Well, we’re fucked. There aren’t any living horses ‘round here and my boys are ready to collapse.”

  Random never saw the two people riding on top of the stagecoach until now. He was in such a hurry to save his life, and the life of his catatonic bride who has been in a state ever since she saw her father’s rib cage torn from his torso.

  But now he sees Oxy with his vulgar chin and scrotumy hair. And he sees the other man standing on top of the stage- coach, his back facing Random.

  A shadow of a man who can melt into the background like silence. Black trench coat blowing in the steel-flavored breeze. His head shifting slowly, eyes moving along the eastern horizon. It is moonless black that way.

  Random looks to the west. Still a line of twilight in that direction. That is where Random wants to be.

  “They call him Jesus Christ,” the girlish hermaphrodite says about the shadow/stranger.

  “Jesus Christ?” Random asks. “Why?”

  “He can work miracles with bullets,” Sharp says. She raises her six-shooter with an awkward grip and tries to twirl the handle like an expert gunslinger, but it slips out of her fingers and thuds the ground.

  She leaves it there. Pretends it didn’t happen. “He says his real name is Death. He says he is the Grim Reaper.”

  Sharp stands up, brushes thorns and dirt from her pants.

  “Is he human?” Random asks.

  The black gunslinger drops from the stagecoach, out of sight.

  “No,” Sharp shakes her head. “He’s something better.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jesus Christ can sense something. He steps through needle bushes and scorpion pits, and peers deep into the darkness. The landscape is alive with movement and metallic sounds.

  Dragonfly skin creeping the dirt.

  He can sense hundreds of teethy jaws clattering in unison, razor claws slicing through the air.

  “Let’s go,” Battle Johnny calls, stepping out of the saloon with a jug of the local whiskey. “Let’s get out of this dump.”

  Jesus squints his pinhole eyes and spits tobacco on a dog’s corpse.

  Random hustles to the coach and tries not to look at his wife as he gets in. He sits next to her so that he can hold her hand, so that he doesn’t have to sit across from her and look into her fear-webbed face.

  Everyone is inside now but Death, who stands out in the desert watching the darkness.

  Battle Johnny calls out, “Come on, time to go.”

  Jesus just stands there like a piece of the landscape. “Let’s go!” Battle Johnny screams.

  Still standing there.

  “Come on!”

  Jesus goes “Shhhhhh!” and so Battle Johnny raises a finger at him.

  One more squint of his eyes and Jesus is satisfied. He returns to the coach and takes his place next to Oxy, takes one of the shotguns from the pile on the roof.

  “They’re coming,” he mutters to the side-burned hermaphrodite.

  Oxy taps the brim of Death’s hat and chuckles. “Maybe they’ll catch us this time,” he says, missing teeth, and whips at the horses “YAA!” back on the road heading west.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “She must be in another place,” the green-faced man says about Typi, looking through her ear to see what’s in her mind.

  “She’s ruined,” Random says. “She became mine just today and already she’s junk.” He bites his lip.

  There are screeching voices in the background. Crawly things making their way closer to the stagecoach.

  “The horses are slowing down,” Cry says.

  They look out of the window and see the landscape moving at a relaxing pace.

  “Get those horses going!” Battle Johnny screams at the people on the roof.

  Oxy calls down to them, “They’re exhausted. If I push them any harder they’re going to collapse.”

  Random can hear him giggling.

  Battle Johnny raises his finger at everyone in the stagecoach and shuts his eyes tight, trying to think.

  The others watch him, blocking out the scratchy-gurgle sounds coming closer-closer. And then he stops thinking and snaps his fingers at the people to his right.

  “Nixx, Cry, get on the roof,” he says. “Sharp, have your pistols ready. Make every bullet count.”

  Battle Johnny looks at Random who is trying to shake

  life back into his bride.

  “Boy, what’s your name?” he asks him.

  “Rrr-andom,” he tells the hermaphrodite gunslinger.

  “Random.” He nods at him and pats his shoulder awkwardly. “Do you know how to use this, Random?”

  He shows a bloody pistol to the boy.

  Random shakes his head.

  “Take it anyway,” Battle Johnny says, poking its handle into his chest. “Don’t use it unless one of them comes close to you. Shoot at point-blank range and you won’t waste any bullets.”

  Random shrugs at the hermaphrodite. He takes the gun only to see if Typi will get mad. She does not approve of weapons, just like her father. She made him promise never to touch them, that she would rip out his eyes if he ever fired one shot, even at the ground. But she doesn’t seem to notice the gun, still shivering, deep in stare. He wipes the blood off the shaft with her wedding dress, her mother’s beautiful heirloom wedding dress. But no response. He points it at her head, between her eyes. No response. It is like he isn’t even there.

  Cry and Nixx climb up to the roof, balancing on spare guns and supplies, surrounded by violent whispers, growls and gnashing sounds from the shadowy parts of the desert.

  “We’re going to have to fight them,” Cry tells Death, but he is already pointing his shotgun at things behind them.

  Cry squats down and arches her back until it is C-shaped. The metal stegosaurus-spikes make cr
ystal-ring noises in the wind and reflect lantern light into Nixx’s eyes. He sees her as walking cutlery, a sadistic flesh-machine of erotic knives and razorblade kisses.

  She sees Nixx admiring her figure and pinches his long ears.

  “Can you really see the future?” he asks her.

  She smiles and bites her puffy lower lip.

  “Fuck me and I can make you see the future too,” she says, waving her tongue at him like a river snake.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A horn blows from the southeast.

  “What is that?” Sharp asks, trying to get a good look out of the stagecoach window. Random listens for it, but won’t look out the window.

  The horn blows again. A steam whistle.

  “It’s a train,” Battle Johnny says. “It’s a goddamned train.”

  Random can hear the chug-chugging of a train in the distance, growing louder.

  Battle Johnny thinks for a minute . . .

  “There’s no towns southeast of here,” he says. “Where the hell is that thing coming from?”

  “And where is it going?” Sharp adds.

  Battle Johnny has his finger raised, just slightly and none of the others inside the coach seem to notice, his mind whipping an idea into shape.

  “Oxy,” he yells out of the window. “Catch that train. We’re getting out of this death box.”

  “The horses can’t run anymore,” Oxy yells. “We’ll never make it.”

  Oxy combs his sideburns with rage.

  “Force them to run,” Battle Johnny shouts. “We only need them as far as the train.”

  Oxy doesn’t respond, attacking his fiery hair with the tin comb.