The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

CITY IN THE TORRID WASTE by t. Winter-Damon

The air heatshimmered. The persistent wind moaned longingly. Spiraling dustclouds and fragile pinnacles of metal oxide salts, pigmented in a harsh, dusky rainbow taunting of empty promise, surrounded the smoky bronze, UV-screening bubble-dome that crouched above the City in the Torrid Waste. Ghosts of long-dead millions howled outside its gates.

Once, the festering pit in the alkaline earth nearby had disgorged a wealth of varied ores, copper its primary vein. But that was before payload dwindled and the peons of the ascian latitudes slaved it forth far cheaper. Before the acid rains swept westward. Before the Hole in the Sky ripped wide. The once-beautiful, fertile flesh of Mother Earth ravished, defiled, and corrupted. Made barren.

Now, the minds of the City’s denizens mirrored the nature-twisted configurations of the landscape. As it is without. So it is within…

The grass-green sheers billowed and swirled in the sweet-scented gusts of synth-breeze. The air was crisp, cool, and tinged with a whisper of magnolia blossoms and jasmine, a deft mingling accomplished by the dome’s air-conditioning plant. The total power consumption of the city must graph-out into stratospheric levels of mega-kilowattage, but the enormous pull, even at the summer’s ferocious peak temps, never caused a black- or brownout status. The solar collectors outside the dome, concealed beyond the nearest ridgeline, swallowed the sun’s fierce rays, collecting, storing, and assimilating the almost limitless energy. They were also virtually indestructible, built to last as long as the dream of humankind survived, and longer…

But the hidden machinations of tech-support were the farthest thing from this dark-maned nymph’s far darker mind.

Her long, delicate fingers caressed the gentle slope of shoulder, raising gooseflesh at the electricity of awakened desire. Her fingers trailed the sensuous curve of spine, the ripe, melonlike swell of lushly rounded buttocks, massaging the so-sensitive flesh with feather-tingling strokes. The taffy-haired girl giggled musically in Morrigan’s ear, letting her pink, warm tongue flicker into the shell-like orifice, seeking to return measure for measure every exquisite, eternal-moment of pleasure-torment she received. “Ooooohhhhh,” she cooed in ecstasy, “yes, yes, touch me there—” as Morrigan’s other hand splayed out, trailing down the soft taper of the girl’s lower belly, her fingers grasping the stiff penis jutting from her groin, encircling the thick shaft, stroking and toying with rigid gristle. The girl moaned, wriggling her hips in desire. “And there,” she mewled, as the ravenhaired woman cupped the swollen sac of her testicles, squeezing them ever so gently, savoring the wicked sensations as egglike glands rolled about within the hairy, wrinkled flesh of her scrotum. “Ohhh, yes, and there!” the girl groaned, as Morrigan explored lower, pushing her fingers into the wet heat of the girl’s sex-grotto…

The glistening mask of jet-black feathers betrayed no hint of emotion, save for the terrible hunger betrayed in the slits of the eyeholes, emeralds that sparked with a cold, unquenchable fire. The dark vision of the Raven’s mask with its cruel beak poised above her only served to whet the taffy-haired girl’s excitement. Her own elaborate mask of feathers was a bizarrerie of bobbing plumes and downy tufts the same color as her hair, but with bold accents of black and crimson.

Morrigan lowered her sleek body onto the girl’s lap, impaling herself on the upthrust phallus…

They were both bathed in sweet, trickling perspiration, reeking of pleasure-pheremones, as were the forest-green sheets rumpled beneath them. Two roses and a thorn all intertwined.

“When will you next bleed?” Morrigan whispered in query. “I desire the bright poppy blossoms of your flux…” Her teeth glittered whitely in the luring darkness of the mouth-slit.

“The delights of Yang. And Yin. These I can provide.” The girl answered. “But what you desire—this I cannot give, I regret. My flow, never more than a pain-ripe bud, withered by my late teens to an echo of misery, and by my majority was but a dessicated memory…”

“If all you can offer me, My Dear, is the pleasure of your flesh and soul, then I regret…”

Framed by heavy drapes of rich purple velvet, the filmy fabric billowed like clouds of lilac-tinctured smoke. Now, the sweet breath of unnatural breeze was scented of hyacinths, mountain laurel, and Persian lilac. Morrigan turned her Raven-masked face to stare into the eyes of her newest inamorata. The eyes behind the mask were vivid violet. The mask was an extravagant fantasy of rare feather tufts tinted in a rich palette of purple hues, stranded with ropes of tiny seedpearls and sparkling with faceted dangles of amethyst crystal. Her mouth was bare, lips glossed in matching pigments. Even the short spikes of her hair were dyed a coordinating shade.

Their lips joined, drinking deeply of one another’s passion.

Their lips parted. Slid down necks, trailing hot kisses.

Their lips savored the puckered berry-fruit of firm, luscious breasts. So many tasty berries. Suckling. Then slithered lower, leaving snailtrails of glistening saliva in their wake. They explored the warm, dark dimples of navels with their tongues. Then worked lower, into the soft tangle of pubic thickets…

The sheets were soaked with their perspiration and the sweet muskiness of their mingled nectar. Both were gasping softly, basking in the bliss of passion’s ebbtide.

“When will you next bleed?” Morrigan whispered. “I desire the bright hibiscus blossoms of your flux…” Again, her teeth glittered whitely in the luring darkness of the mouth-slit, forming some perverse equation of desire unfathomable to those who do not comprehend the secrets of the shadows…

“I would gladly please you, Darling Morrigan, but, alas, I, as so many now do, entered my menopause quite early, just before my thirtieth birthday… Some claim it is a price we pay for maintaining a strict, total gynarchy. You are two years too late, I fear…”

The girl was so blonde her hair sparkled like filaments of purest gold. She was sleek and voluptuously formed, with lush, cantaloupe-sized breasts, so firm and succulent. She was clad all in buttersoft black leather, with a laceup bustier, sleek, tapered pants, tall, spikeheeled boots, and a true relic, an ancient cycle jacket—truly a museum piece… But the girl could obviously afford it. She had it all. Wellturned. And. Wellheeled.

Oh, yes, and nahualli jaguar mask of exquisitely painted feathers.

Quite fetching, really.

They had met, as usual, at the Cafe Harry Zero (its namesake the legendary last-gasp neo-Surrealist genius), the au courant place for the avant garde of the City in the Torrid Waste, hangout for painters, Virtual-artists, psychmontagists, Chaos-tappers, poets, pagans, perverts, and all the hippest of hip dilettantes and cognoscenti.

The room, their trysting place, was a study in dark passion. A place to release the bete noir in all its raging, lustful fury.

An Asylum of Desire.

No doors.

No windows.

The interior of the massive trapezoid all done in tufted black leather with silver concho-studs. Alight with a myriad of firefly-flickering red candles, dripping, slowly dripping rivulets of bloodred wax.

At room center, a floor-to-ceiling turnstile of ebon wood and stainless-steel hooks, displaying an SOTA atrocity exhibit of whips and chains and manacles and leather masks and body corsets.

Oh, yes.

Tantric to the max.

They peeled.

They squealed.

In one another’s arms they reeled.

The blonde delighted in Morrigan’s six champagne-cup-sized breasts.

Morrigan found the blonde’s laceup back a deliciously wicked novelty. And the mutant pleasure-folds its unfettered cincture soon revealed. She’d squandered a fortune on the DNA-surgeons and graft-mod-clinicians. She was deep into body modification. Very deep. Both scrupulously shaved armpits sported synth-vulvas, exquisitely pink and alluring. The standard nipple-rings. Her belly, as was the current fashion, was double-sexed, brandishing a quite functional twelve-inch phallus, and beneath it, a golden-mossed mons tricked out with a series of silver rings piercing her outer labia, laced with a whip-thin thong of nightblack leather. Simply begging to be untied…

She had everything money could buy.

Everything the scalpel and hormones and gene-splice could offer.

She and Morrigan pushed one another beyond the thresholds of pain and pleasure. Again. And again. And again.

Oh, she was built for pleasure.

But, when it came to that crucial question.

No. She couldn’t bleed.

In desperation, Morrigan sought the services of the electronic bulletin board. Booted up her PC. Posting a WANTED in the PERSONALS.

How mundane!

How declasse!

But it expanded her network. The bonephone in her skull soon buzzed with fresh contacts reaching out to touch her neural nexus, sublim stims the next best thing to being there…

But what a mess of hags and skaggs her urgent plea unleashed!

The outcasts from Boilsuckers Anonymous they seemed indeed. The mutant spawn of rad-burned genes, most surely. As there were no men allowed within the City, once long ago known as “… Too Tough to Die,” all propagation was clinical. Sex was pure pleasure, love and tenderness so refined (with a few S&M-fixated exceptions), only one woman could bring another such exquisite, transcendent ecstasy. Stray males from New Babylon were captured by the valiant War Mays, tormented and abused, then penned in the subterranean laserbore tunnels just beyond the dome, and milked of their venom as one might milk a viper. Then exterminated. Recent graft technology allowed the taking of organs—the addition of a stalwart, functional penis to milady’s anatomy did away with the need for those outmoded and cumbersome dildos and vibrators, once a staple of intrafemale congress. But, regrettably, once in a while the unfortunate occurred, and a tainted male was taken for de-seeding. One with radiation-twisted DNA structures…

Morrigan could scarcely believe there could be so many pathetic creatures! And all seemed eager to couple with her. Eager to offer her the crimson blossoms of their flux. Horrid bat-winged grotesques. Blubbery travesties with piglike faces. Hairy, crook-shanked things like she-goats. Walking skeletons, with bones barely encased by pallid, taut-stretched skin. Flopping, flabby dugs hanging to their navels. Drooping, flaccid buttocks. And the stinking wounds between their legs! Flesh covered by festering sores and scabrous crusts and ringworm and enflamed clusters of pus-engorged pimples… Uuuggghhhhh! How could even another of their blighted kind enjoin in amorous pursuit with such nightmarish horrors…?

How could she ever sate her cravings with beasts such as these?

Very near admitting defeat, Morrigan followed the directions she’d been given, taking a floater into the City’s most exclusive section. The triangular pad skimmed gracefully along, several inches above the pavement, homing on the coordinate data she’d punched into the locator control mounted in the armrests of the body-conforming recliner.

When she buzzed up the sec system at the luxurious compound, the soft, sensuous voice of the computer begged her indulgence while it sought access clearance for her. The wait was a matter of mere seconds. The twin semicircles of the moongate in the high wall swung open of its own accord, and the sec’s synth-voice bade her welcome.

She entered a lush, tropical garden, following a flagstone path between the broad leaves of banana trees and splitleaf philodendrons, Morrigan soon found herself in an open, gladelike area, beautifully landscaped with surrounding stone tiers planted with a wide variety of succulents and other ground covers, interspersed with a seemingly limitless variety of bizarre cacti sprouting jutting shafts, near-geometric pads, arms, and assorted outthrusts, all bristling with vicious needles.

In the center of the glade was a zero-G bubble, its machinery and generators no doubt secreted beneath the flagstone patio on which it rested. Within, Morrigan could see two quite naked forms, twisting, twining, and pleasurably writhing in a slow pinwheel spin of shapely legs, arms and assorted curves, silver-blonde and auburn-red tresses whipping about in SloMo spin. The air was filled with musical giggles, warm and melodious and crystalline, accompanied by moaning gasps and oohs and ahhs of passionate abandon…

When the pair at last slowed their spin and floated gently to the ground, they collapsed at first into a tangle of intertwined limbs. When they untangled, the former kaleidoscope of girlflesh resolved itself into two very attractive individuals of quite similar physical appearance, though both, of course, were fashionably masked. Neither seemed embarrassed nor concerned by her otherwise total nakedness.

“You’re Morrigan?” the redhead questioned.

“Yes.”

“I’m Badb,” the redhead said.

“And I’m Fea,” the blonde said. “If you haven’t already guessed—we’re sisters.” Her chin was upturned slightly, and her lips were formed in a peevish pout even as she spoke.

“Don’t mind her, she’s such a bitch! But we’re very close…” Badb added, as if Morrigan needed that explanation.

The redhead sported an owl mask, in various tones and shades of rust and brown with accents of ochre and burnt sienna and rich umber.

Her sister wore an owl mask also. But hers was snowy white, blending with the flow of her tresses, making it quite difficult to tell exactly where the hair ended and the feathers of the mask began.

Morrigan’s breath came hard and trembly. Her pulse rate elevated, drumming a tattoo of lust in her ears, her temples, and her sleek throat. Her loins tingled quite naughtily, and she felt all hot and moist and quivery down there, at the sight presented by the two lusciously nude sisters.

They soon “coaxed” Morrigan into disrobing also.

They did a little mixing. Good hosts these girls were.

When at last all three collapsed in blissful languor, the Raven-masked brunette “popped the question” to her two newfound lovers: “I suppose this is a futile question, but when will you next bleed?” Morrigan whispered. “I long for the bright crimson rose blossoms of your flux…” Yet again, her teeth glittered whitely in the luring darkness of the mouth-slit.

“Well, a rather kinky request, I’d say,” Badb giggled, “but you are certainly in luck, My Dear Ms. M. Would you care to spend the night with us? You see, I am due tomorrow, or the next day, at the latest—”

“And my period is due two days hence,” Fea said. “We suffer together…”

The gossamer fabric billowed between drapes whose dark bulk suggested ancient standing stones. The rumpled satin sheets and coverlets of the bed were rippling surface of a chill, deep pool or a floe of glistening obsidian, mirroring the nightsky, appearing velvet-soft, yet deceptively razor-edged… All black as the glossy feathers of the Raven’s mask, poised above this sensuous interplay of light and shadows. Curves of snow-white flesh bared to her dark cravings in a tableau of Illusion precise in its every detail…

The dark eyeholes of the midnight-black mask burned fiercely. Her teeth glittered white, whiter than clean-stripped bone. Her tongue darted out, licking her lips, savoring the feral muskiness, the tang of salt and copper…

Her lips were brilliant red. Red as poppy blossoms. Red as hibiscus blossoms. Red as roses. Red with dripping effuvial rubies of poison-rich blood…

Her knowledge encompassed the jargonese term by which the ancient headshrinkers would have neatly pigeonholed her own desire: “Haematophilia” (blood loving) the clinical delineation for those possessed by the obsessive/compulsive fixation to indulge in bloodsucking. Or, more specifically, “haematomenophilia…”

But those were the Old Sciences, male-dominated, the same sciences that had raped and pillaged the Earth Mother through their self-serving greed, prejudice, and shortsightedness. Slaves. So ludicrously proud of their own intellect. Mindlessly serving their true masters. Lucifer. Mammon. And Baal Phegor (already long-corrupted to Belphegor).

Some would term her desire simply a perverse form of vampirism.

But Morrigan knew more. Far more. Morrigan was an adept.

Morrigan knew herself to be a savior. A martyr, yes. With the roots of her act of absolution traceable to ancient Knowledge of Blood, the legend of the Fisher King (a male-perverted interpretation of a far-older matriarchal parable), the menstrual cycles of the moon, and the Celtic ritual of Sin Eating… But even a martyr can temper the degree of her self-sacrifice, perhaps even temper it with pleasure.

Love can heal all wounds.

Through love, self-sacrificing, and sympathetic magick, the Earth Mother could be healed. The poisons purified. The soil and seas and air made whole.

So Morrigan at last found the blossoms of the lunar cycle she had sought for. And, able to indulge her need fulfilled twice over, she wasted no time moving in with the two sisters. And one may suppose they all lived and loved quite happily ever after, savoring (so to speak) their days of wine and roses.

At least until they reached that “midlife crisis.” But I quite suppose that is a story that will be later told.