Exquisite Corpse (24 page)

“I love heroin users,” Jay whispered. “As long as they're young enough and not too strung out, their flesh has a faint gingery taste.”

“What about the risk?”

“HIV? If it finds me, I accept it with my blessing. Maybe
it's already found me. If so, I welcome it.” Jay leaned over the boy's prone body and kissed me, cupping his hand behind my neck, sliding his tongue deep into my mouth. I wondered at his attitude, but could not argue with it; after all, I had never felt better in my life.

Birdy moaned. We glanced down at him. His eyelids fluttered; his tongue scraped over dry lips. When I gave him a tot from the flask of rum on the nighttable, he sucked gratefully at the bottle's neck.

“Jam it down his throat,” Jay suggested. “Then we can break it.”

I ignored him, sliding my arm under the thin shoulders, cradling the meagre frame. I felt Jay's lips brush the top of my head, a brief affectionate kiss; then his weight left the bed. Immersing myself in the odours and textures of the boy's body, which was now entirely out of his control and mine to handle as I wished, I barely noticed.

Though it owed more to strong drugs than sexual desire, Birdy's passive state made me nostalgic. I beg you to recall that the last two men I'd killed, junior doctor Waring and poor Sam, had been struggling, hurt and bleeding, fighting for their lives. (I refused to include Doctor Drummond in this count—he was not the sort of man I would have chosen to kill, and his death had been uninterestingly easy.) Now here was a scruffy, beautiful boy immobilized and waiting for my blade. It took me back, it did.

All the way back to my first time. I'd been seventeen, shy and spotty, but had managed to talk my way into the fringes of a punk crowd brimming with testosterone and rebellion. Another boy and I broke into a derelict office building—I no longer remember what we pretended to be looking for. He said he would do anything I liked, and I ordered him to kneel before me. When he did, I knocked him semiconscious with a brick and heaved him across someone's forgotten desk. I didn't mind, a little later, when he vomited on the dusty desktop.
A good bit of sperm and blood had already seeped out of him, and the fluids mingled warmly on the glass. I rubbed my hands through them, stroked them over my chest and down to the greasy juncture where my cock met his asshole. Though I had already more or less killed him, I didn't consider the possibility that he could be artful enough to kill me too, months or years in the future, in the harsher light of another decade. It was 1977, Sid Vicious was still alive, and no one had a horror of bodily fluids. Vomit was one of the less precious bodily fluids, but after watching our wretched heroes slash their veins, blow mucus out of their nostrils, and void the contents of their stomachs onstage, we could scarcely upset ourselves over a harmless string of bile oozing from a lover's mouth. After all, the musicians vomited onstage to show their contempt for us, their audience. And contempt was surely an expression of love.

Now Jay was padding back across the bedroom, stroking the length of my spine, pressing something smooth and cold into my hand. I lifted my head from the boy's chest. It was a hunting knife Jay had given me, a sleek bone-handled thing with a barbed blade fully eight inches long.

“It was my great-great-uncle's,” he said.

“I love you, Jay.”

“I can't say that. If I loved you, I don't think we'd both still be alive. But I
know
you, Andrew, and that's something I've never said to anyone else.”

“I know you too.”

I felt him shiver. “Go ahead. Do it any way you like, but do it now. I want to see him die.”

I placed the tip of the blade against the boy's throat, right at the V of his collarbone. It was sharp enough to pierce the skin with very little pressure. A bead of blood welled up, very dark against the parchment-pale skin, then spilled over the ridge of the bone and streaked the left pectoral.

I always have to laugh at writers who employ the phrase
Something snapped inside him
as a prelude to violence. The only time I ever felt anything snap inside me was the day I decided to leave prison, a sharp immediate relief like the snapping of an elastic that had constricted my heart for years. But when I saw that first drop of blood—always, when I saw the first drop of blood—something
melted
inside me. Like a wall of earth crumbling and dissolving in a hard rain, like a sheet of ice breaking apart and letting a river run free.

The knife parted skin and muscle, skated over breastbone. When it reached the hollow of the ribs it sank deep into the body. There was no resistance, no indication of agony; Birdy lay motionless in his restraints and let me open him up like a Christmas parcel. As my hand brushed his erection aside, I felt the blade grate against his pubic bone. For a long moment his torso remained intact, bisected from throat to crotch by a narrow red ribbon. Then his wound blossomed open and his contents spilled forth, a cornucopia of rare fluids and stinking scarlet treasures …

A sepulchre of disease.

Time slowed to a crawl as we stared at the boy's yawning body cavity. I could not make myself touch it. At last Jay put his hands in the wound and pulled the edges apart, giving us a better view of the soapy-looking nodes and curls of tissue sprouting from the boy's organs, from his very
meat.
The things were everywhere, sinister as mushrooms, obscenely white against the glistening reds and pinks of his inner body.

“What is it?” I asked at last. “Some sort of cancer?”

“Something poisonous … from his drugs … or the air … or the water.” Jay stroked one of the pale nodes, then smelled his fingers, which were coated with thin blood and a greasy-looking substance. “We can't eat this.”

I took several deep breaths, trying to compose myself. I'd tapped into my murderous slipstream, worked myself up to killing intensity. Now I was afraid to touch the prize. I felt like a starving man led to an exquisitely set table, titillated with
luscious smells from the kitchen, then informed (just as the first steaming delicacy is set before him) that the cook has laced the banquet with weed killer.

Jay was kneeling above me, his hands and bare chest and pale hair streaked with blood. He looked delicious. I reached for him and pulled him down, and we grappled in the wetness of the spreading stain. He raked his nails across my buttocks, up over my back, etching my flesh with his own designs. The scratches blazed as if doused with acid. I heaved him over and rolled on top of him, pinned his arms, sank my teeth into his biceps. His skin tasted of sweat and boy's blood. Twisting beneath me, he managed to grab a handful of my hair and yank it until the roots shrieked. Without quite realizing what I was about to do—I had subdued so many boys in just the same way—I gave him a quick, sharp clip on the jaw.

Jay's head reeled loosely on his neck. He fell back on the bed, eyes flickering up to whites. I saw blood on his lips, on his teeth, but couldn't tell if it was his own or our guest's. I pulled his eyelids up, made certain both his pupils were the same size, checked his pulse and breathing. I'd only stunned him. Quickly I removed the cuffs from Birdy's wrists and fastened them on Jay's. I didn't bother with the ankle restraints. I wouldn't mind if he thrashed a bit.

I turned him over, stroked the golden down on the backs of his thighs. When I parted his buttocks and ran a finger down his crack, he made a low protesting sound. I hesitated, then leaned over to get the condom and tube of lubricant I knew I would find in the nightstand drawer. Within seconds I had the rubber on my erect cock, well greased. I gripped Jay's hipbones and lifted him, probed his ass, slid into the tight heat of his lower intestine.

The invasion shocked him into rigidity, which made his inner muscles ripple and constrict. He groaned into the pillow, a helpless, furious sound. I bit the back of his neck hard, a favourite gesture of mine ever since I had seen a lioness do it
to her prey on a nature programme. At the same time I pressed the tip of my cock against his prostate and rocked gently. Despite himself, Jay began to melt around me.

“It's all right,” I said into his ear. “It's me inside you, it's Andrew. I'm the one who stayed on my own, remember? You need to have me inside you. This way you can keep me with you forever.”

Jay mumbled something into the pillow.

“What?”

He raised his head and spoke distinctly.
“Then take off the rubber.”

I stopped fucking him. When he glanced over his shoulder, I saw tears on his face. “I mean it. If you're going to rape me, do it right. Make every cell in my body belong to you.”

Our eyes locked and something passed between us, something that changed this from an act of rape to an act of love, more intimate than killing the boy together had been. I pulled out, peeled off the condom, and applied more lubricant to my throbbing cock. Jay's ass opened willingly to me as I slid back in, naked as the day I was born. We moved together as if we had done this a thousand times, came together as if the rhythms of our bodies were perfectly synchronized. As I shot pearlescent poison deep into Jay's entrails, he bit my fingers nearly hard enough to draw blood.

“Hungry?” I asked. “Who decides who we eat next? Hmmm, Jay?”

“You do,” he whispered into the palm of my hand.

I cradled him, treasured him. He was still alive, and I respected him infinitely, for now he had acknowledged what we both knew to be the truth.

Jay was indeed the splendid young animal of the night.

But I had tamed him just enough to show who was the master.

“
H
ere's a nifty item from yesterday's paper. Shandra McNeil of Gertrude, Loooz-i-anna, was convicted on three counts of attempted murder, which may be upgraded to first-degree murder if any of her victims dies before her. McNeil, who has AIDS, engaged in unprotected sex with several men she met at singles' bars. Three who have since tested HIV-positive brought suit against her. McNeil pled guilty, and said she exposed at least ten men to the AIDS virus without warning them. Her reason: she desperately wanted a child before she died. Shandra McNeil is now five months pregnant.

“Well, if it wasn't for that fetus, I'd say pin a medal on her. She's wiped out at least three breeder assholes, probably a lot more, and all because her biological clock didn't
stop
ticking when the time bomb in her cells
started.
Shandra, you dumb bitch, thanks for your wonderful addition to the human race. The world really needs another digestive tract. Let's just hope the poor kid catches HIV sliding down your diseased cunt, so your stupidity-riddled genes can die off as soon as possible.

“Let's move on to more reputable sources, shall we? Here's one from the
Weekly World News.
The headline: AIDS KILLER RISES FROM DEAD! The story: ‘Gay serial killer Andrew Compton died of AIDS on November fourth … and on November fifth, he flew the coop! Bureaucrats at Painswick Prison in Birmingham, England, deny responsibility' … hmmm, big surprise there … ‘since the homicidal homo disappeared from the morgue of a nearby hospital where he was being held for autopsy.

“‘Compton was arrested in nineteen eighty-eight after a sex-and-torture spree that left twenty-three young men dead and dismembered. Shortly before his death, he tested HIV-positive. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS' … thank you,
Weekly World News
… ‘is considered unlikely to survive in bodies dead over twenty-four hours. BUT IS ANDREW COMPTON REALLY DEAD? Scotland Yard is reportedly treating the case as a body-snatching, but offered no comment about who might want the AIDS-infected body of a vicious psychopath.'”

Luke paused for a beat, then delivered the punch line he'd planned around this story. “Well, hell, who WOULDN'T?”

He caught Soren's eye over the control panel. Soren closed his eyes and slowly shook his head, denoting silent suffering. OK, so the tabloid story had been in bad taste. WHIV needed a little comic relief every now and then.

“I think it's about time to take a call,” he said. Soren nodded, picked up a cellular phone and listened, then handed it to Luke, who placed it in a cradle on the console and punched the speaker button.

“You're on WHIV. Talk to me.”

A girl's voice, smug and self-righteous. “I just wanted to say I think you're a very sick person.”

“No shit, honey. I'm on ten kinds of medicine, all of which are toxic, none of which I can pay for. I've got sores around my asshole from weeks of chronic diarrhea and cheap toilet paper. My throat feels like it's fall of ground glass and I get big
black spots in front of my eyes when I stand up. Thanks for the diagnosis.”

“That's not what I mean and you know it. AIDS is a poison you create in your own blood. You say you hate breeders, but the ability to nurture life is a sacred gift from the Goddess. Whether you know it or not, you suckle at Her breast.”

“Well, Her rancid milk hasn't done a thing for my T-cell count. You fucking Wiccans love a secret, and I'll blow it right now: your entire reason for existing is obsolete. You worship an outdated biological imperative. Have a shitty day.”

Click. Dial tone.

“Martyr, you're into that moon-hugging stuff. Do you worship a Goddess? Don't tell me if you do. I hate those bitches, all but Kali—at least when she breeds, she eats her young.”

Soren had rigged the chip of his cellular phone so that it generated a new ID number each time it was used, and couldn't be traced. As a result, they had a different phone number every broadcast. Reception was often very poor out here in the swamp, but Johnnie kept them close enough to New Orleans to pick up calls. Today they were tied up at one of the many deserted docks they used, which helped a little.

Luke switched over to music mode and played Robyn Hitchcock's love ballad “Queen Elvis” from the acoustic album
Eye.
Looking at the jewelbox, he recalled the lament for a lost lover in one of the other songs.
Even talking is out of reach
… It captured the white-hot agony of an affair ended in anger, the silent void left by the absence of the person with whom you'd had the most intensely emotional conversations of your life.