Sex and Death in Television Town Read online

  Random doesn’t move. He lets her body fall away from him, drop off the train into a puddle of mud.

  All he can think about as her half a body becomes a part of the distance is how her wedding dress no longer looks anything like a wedding dress.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Battle Johnny wakes up.

  He is inside the overturned stagecoach, looking up through the window at the stars. The screech-burble noises are surrounding him, scraping against the wood of the coach, and he realizes that he is alone.

  His pants have been torn from his lower legs, blood painted so that he can’t see his leg hairs, but nothing’s broken.

  He peeps out: It is dark around him. He can barely make out the back of the train as it moves away from him in the distance. Hundreds of devils chasing the rear.

  There aren’t too many of them left here. Only about a dozen or so. He can see the outlines of their little childlike bodies. They are squatting down, tearing the horses into strips and rubbing the blood on their necks and potbellies. They are so engrossed in the strips of meat that they don’t even bother killing two horses that are still attached to the coach.

  Battle Johnny feels for his pistol but the holster is empty. He looks down, too dark, he feels the floor for a gun. Fingers crawling like tarantulas. There is a corpse here. His hand stumbles into it and bursts through the skull, gushing into a pouch of chalky dust.

  Examining the body with his fingers: the skin is as hard as wood but thin. And it is hollow inside. Its internal organs are made of dust.

  His hand digs deep inside.

  “There’s got to be something inside of them . . .” he whispers to the body. “A heart, a stomach, something . . .” No hope for him to save his life so at least he can satisfy a curiosity.

  Burrowing through crumbly innards, Battle Johnny hits something halfway through the body, at the point where the chest meets the stomach. It is something solid and cold. Something metal.

  Battle Johnny grabs it with two fingers and pulls it out of the dust.

  “A gun,” he says, rubbing his palm against.

  It is a strange shape for a gun, long fat barrel and most of it is coated in fur, but still a gun.

  Without giving it a thinking, Battle Johnny takes a knife from his boot and climbs out of the stagecoach. The creatures shriek at him as he thuds onto the ground and fires at them.

  At first he thinks the gun doesn’t work because the bullets don’t make any noise. They shoot like tiny arrows. The only noise is the cutting of air.

  The demon children scatter and Battle Johnny charges to the horses. His legs must be hurt worse than he realized because he has a severe limp and isn’t going very fast.

  A shrieking black shape skids in front of him and cuts open his chest. Then disappears before Battle Johnny gets a chance to shoot. Another strikes his back and he cries out. He turns to it, but it is already gone.

  When he gets to the horses he notices that they are not actually all that alive. One has a spear of wood stuck in its neck and the other has a large wound on its stomach.

  He chooses the one with the stomach wound, cuts it from its harness and mounts it. Then off he goes. Riding bare-backed on an injured horse.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Death is on top of the train, near the ass, bouncing on a mound of plump flesh. With his black widows, he shoots spider-shaped bullets into black figures crawling up the sides of the train.

  Coming up the tracks, he sees Battle Johnny in the middle of the demon horde, whirling a strange furry gun over his head, riding a horse with its stomach dangling inside-out. The creatures rip into him as he goes, slicing off strips of his skin, a bit here and there, but they can’t get him off the horse.

  Death climbs down the back of the train, waiting to help him out if he makes it that far. If there’s anything left of him by the time he gets there.

  Battle Johnny takes the pain like a man, as if he isn’t part woman at all. And he makes it all the way up to the back of the train before the horse starts to stumble over its own guts.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cry and Nixx are naked together. Wrapped up in a sweaty pool. She has him pinned down underneath her crotch. Her giant metal spikes pointing at the ceiling, gyrating as she stretches him out. Mouths full of the taste of each other.

  Across from them, the others have set up a lantern but there isn’t very much light. They can just barely make out each other’s curvature in the red-flickering.

  “What do you see?” Cry asks as she finishes coming into the man’s mouth.

  He can’t speak. Her vagina muscles are tight around his tongue and don’t want to let him go.

  The other people are disgusted with them, pacing up and down the aisle, blabbing “How can they do that at a time like this?” and “What the hell is wrong with them?”

  Cry slicks her glossy stomach down his face and rests her chin on his chest. Smiling into him and waiting for an answer.

  “I see people with strange heads,” Nixx says.

  The woman puppy-licks him. “Telos.”

  “How do you do that?” he asks.

  “My cum is magic,” she says. “I have a wizard for a cunt.”

  And she pets her pubic hair at him.

  “Where did you come from?” Nixx asks.

  She blinks at him and laughs. “I like you, you look like an elf,” and pinches him on the nose.

  Nixx lays his head into a pillow of meat and imagines windmill blades on the ceiling.

  Cry wipes her fingernail across the goop on Nixx’s lower lip and sucks it into her mouth.

  Her eyes drift and roll for a moment.

  “We’re headed there,” she says.

  Nixx raises an eyebrow.

  “This train is going to Telos.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “I hate it when I’m alive,” Random says, sitting on a rib cage chair full of lungs that breathe against his back. His heart pounding out of his fingertips.

  The air is hot and thick.

  Sharp and Oxy are ignoring him, sitting by the train hole pointing guns, not bothering to comfort him even though they know that’s what he wants. After Typi died, they shrugged at Random and figured that was enough.

  Their guns almost go off as a door opens up out of the meat next to them, strings of tissue extend as Death and a staggering Battle Johnny enter the car covered in soot and blood.

  Sharp leaps to her feet and goes to Battle Johnny. Cry and Nixx are re-clothed and go to the hermaphrodite to figure out why he is still alive.

  Battle Johnny holds up the furry gun. It is not at all like a gun. More like a sculpture made of squirrel-hair, rat tails, and plastic dolls.

  “Where did you get it?” Nixx asks.

  “Inside one of those things,” he says. “It saved my life.” them.

  Battle Johnny hands him the gun and walks away from them. Barging through Oxy’s shoulder. Not in the mood to discuss anything right now. His wounds are deep and he’s beginning to feel dizzy, itchy-brained. Just wants to sit down and rest for a bit.

  Sharp goes to him. She wraps her arms around him and he kind of hugs her back. He slumps against her shoulder.

  “Battle Johnny?” she says.

  She looks him in the eyes and sees tiny black hairs wiring out of his face. No, they are like veins, something underneath his skin.

  Nixx pulls Sharp away as he sees what is happening to the hermaphrodite. There is something seriously wrong.

  Battle Johnny falls to the floor, a high-pitched squeal echoes out of him as his face begins changing. His flesh blackens, his eyes lose color.

  Sharp breaks away from Nixx and drops to Battle Johnny. But before she reaches him, a blade chops off the top of his head.

  The girlish hermaphrodite bird-screams as a bowl of her lover’s skull falls into her lap. Full of a fizzing charcoal- coated brain. Inside the rest of his head, he is also infested with sizzling black meat, some kind of chemical turning his insides in
to ash.

  Cry crouches down over Battle Johnny and examines the opening she made. The fizzling slows and then stops.

  “It’s a plague,” she says.

  The others jump back, including Sharp who flings the skull cap and cries into her fist.

  “Get him out of here,” Jesus says.

  But the others just stand there, watching the half-blackened man like television.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There is a long period of silence.

  Sharp sits next to Random in the quiet place. Oxy is asleep on a giant liver and Death is exploring the rest of the train.

  Cry and Nixx are back on the floor where they were having sex. The green-faced man thinks he has some personal connection to her since they have fucked and has been following her around the train like a stray cat.

  “What do you think it will be like in Telos?” Nixx asks her.

  She scratches him behind one of his elf-like ears. “I don’t know.”

  “You can see the future,” Nixx points at her vagina. “What is going to happen to us?”

  “I can’t control my sight,” Cry says. “I just see random images of the future in my sex.”

  “Tell me if you ever see me die, okay?” Nixx says.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Positive.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to prepare myself.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I want to go out with a bang.”

  She rolls her eyes at him. “I don’t think you really want to know.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  Her fingers curl around his elfish ears.

  “I’ve already seen you die,” she says.

  Nixx slaps her hand away from his face. “You lie. You’re just teasing.”

  Her face is sincere.

  “I saw your death back on the stagecoach,” she says. “That’s why I slept with you here. I thought we might not have another chance to fuck before you get killed.”

  Nixx shakes his head at her. He doesn’t want to believe her but can’t think of anything to say.

  “I like to fuck every person I come across,” she says. “Too bad I didn’t get a chance to experience the young bride. She was a sweet little girl.”

  Cry gives Nixx a glassy smile and rubs her scaly green legs.

  Death returns.

  He tells them, “No one on the train.”

  “Impossible,” Cry says. “Who’s driving it?”

  “No driver,” he says. “Just empty cars like this.”

  Cry pushes Nixx away from her. “We’re heading for Telos,” she says. Death nods his head.

  Cry curls up into a sleeping position on the floor. “It’s possible the train is a living creature.” She sighs at the men and hermaphrodites. “Guess it can be driving itself.”

  The shadowy gunslinger walks away from them and out of the boxcar.

  “Strange guy,” Nixx says.

  “He’s just a baby,” Cry says, closing her eyes on his green-painted face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In the morning, it is like none of this ever happened. The sky is turquoise blue with billowy clouds over the desert. Prickle-green bushes and cacti and chirping yellow birds.

  Random leans out of the hole in the train to inhale the painting. There aren’t any creatures anymore, no dead bodies, no sign of destruction. The young man absorbs the sun- shine and pretends he’s not on such a horror of a train. Watches the wrens hopping across limbs of Joshua trees.

  “It’s not over yet,” Cry says to him from under his feet.

  He doesn’t know how long she’s been there.

  The train goes underground and comes back out. Random wonders if there are creatures hiding under the ground.

  This is all that they have left:

  1 broken lantern

  1 tin of mackerel

  1⁄2 jug of whiskey

  2 shotguns with 1 shell each

  8 pistols with 3/5/1/1/6/3/2/2 bullets

  1 furry alien pistol with ? bullets

  1 Hoak bow and 8 arrows (Nixx’s)

  7 random bullets

  2 black widow pistols with 3 bullets each (Death’s)

  1 blade from a samurai sword, missing a handle (Cry’s)

  1 shotgun, empty

  17 pistols, empty

  1 hunting knife

  1 wood-cutting axe

  1 gold wedding band (Random’s)

  2 bags of miscellaneous clothes, mostly socks

  1 jar of green face paint (Nixx’s)

  assortment of crudely-designed dildos (Cry’s)

  1 pair of eyeglasses (Sharp’s)

  some rotting fruit

  1 loaf of molding bread

  the clothes on their backs

  Cry also has many items attached to her that should go into their inventory but she claims they are parts of her and not items she carries.

  Nixx demands to be the organizer of their equipment.

  He puts it all in a neat circle around him and makes piles. He creates a garbage pile and discards the empty guns, the rotten food, the whiskey, and the lantern into it. Oxy steals the jug of whiskey and drinks it in front of him.

  “Not a good idea,” Nixx says to Oxy but doesn’t try to stop him from drinking it. And Oxy doesn’t stop drinking it.

  Then Nixx empties all the guns and piles the bullets together. There are 30 bullets. He makes five piles of bullets with six bullets in each pile. Then he places one gun on each of the five piles and discards the other three. He loads one shotgun with both shotgun shells and discards the other.

  Sharp kneels to help Nixx load all the pistols but he slaps at her hand and shoos her away.

  Oxy takes the bad fruit and bread from the garbage pile and has a snack. “That’s it, that’s all of it?” Random asks, eyeing the bullet piles.

  Nixx nods and makes six piles for each of them:

  Oxy: shotgun with 2 shells, axe, 1 pistol with 6 bullets

  Cry: dildos, blade, furry gun Sharp: 1 pistol with 6 bullets, eyeglasses

  Nixx: Hoak bow with 8 arrows, 1 pistol with 6 bullets, green face paint, gold wedding band

  Death: 2 black widow pistols with 3 bullets each, 2 regular pistols with 6 bullets each

  Random: 1 hunting knife

  Oxy adds the whiskey and old food to his pile. They share the tin of fish for breakfast and change their socks.

  Cry gives Random the furry gun. She says, “I don’t use them.” And takes the knife away from him. He doesn’t seem to care either way. He doesn’t make a fuss about not getting a gun in the first place. He doesn’t make a fuss when Nixx takes his wedding ring either, even though it’s the closest thing the group has to money.

  “Six strangers,” Sharp says. The others look at her. “All of our friends and family are dead,” she says.

  “We’re stuck with each other. All strangers.”

  “What about him?” Nixx points at Oxy. “Isn’t he part of your gang?”

  “I barely know him,” she says. “He didn’t mix well with us.”

  Oxy chokes on his whiskey.

  “I fucking hate hermaphrodites,” he says, rubbing his tits at them.

  Cry stands up and stretches her spiky parts. “Well, we’re stuck together. From now on, we’re all family.”

  Family. Random thinks about that for a while. Death is like a father and Cry is like some kind of child-molesting mother. With children in descending order of maturity: Nixx, Sharp, Oxy, and finally himself. He guesses Battle Johnny would have been the oldest sibling and Typi the youngest. But they are gone now. Only the crazy middle children remain.

  Random decides to remember Typi as a younger sister. It’s easier for him this way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The train goes underground again but doesn’t come back out.

  They are in the dark for nearly half an hour before they

  realize that it’s not coming out again.

  “What
’s going on?” Nixx asks Cry.

  The underground brightens but they are still beneath the Earth. Iridescent light emanates from the walls here.

  Random looks out of the hole. “The lights . . ” he says. “Like the light of the moon.” “This is our stop,” Cry says as the train slows and gargle-whistles.

  It stops in a wide-open area, still deep under the ground.

  They just stand there, in the train. There aren’t any people around. Anywhere. The train sits, huffing and bubbling. No passengers getting on or getting off.

  “Come on,” Cry says to them as she climbs out of the hole. Death follows after her.

  The four children hesitate to leave, but eventually decide they’ll be much safer with mommy and daddy, and pile out of the meaty hole. Random exits last.

  Outside of the train, they stand there and look around. They are in an enormous subway. The ceiling is dozens of feet high. The iridescent lights make Random dizzy.

  The train’s whistle blows and it chargle-chugs slowly away, into the dark unlit parts of the underground.

  They are all alone. Their eyes shifting every which way but there is nothing much to see. Just a wide cavern with smooth walls.

  The sweaty parts of them begin to freeze.

  “Where is it going?” Random asks, about the train.

  His voice echoes.

  “There’s nothing that way,” Oxy says. “Any farther west and it’ll fall off the end of the world.”

  “The track probably twists north or south,” Nixx says. “Or maybe the end of the world is its destination,” says Sharp.

  Cry waves their questions away and calls them useless.

  She points to a tall iron ladder that goes up a few dozen feet and then disappears into the ceiling.

  “Must be the way out,” she says.

  Before anyone can argue, Jesus begins climbing the ladder. They have no choice but to follow their protector.