"You didn't, did you?' she gargled.

Smith stared, frozen in disgust.

Marie craned her neck further, her face wavering. "You weren't ready, were you?" she gushed. It sounded like an accusation. "G.o.dd.a.m.n you, you were supposed to be ready..."

Then her eyes rolled up white, and her head fell back.

Ready, Smith thought. His face dripped. Madness. The silence gaped at him as he tried to bring her back. No pulse. No breath. He straddled her. One, two, three, four, five, his thoughts counted off in CPR. With each downward thrust, more black slime eddied from each orifice. Popping black bubbles frothed at her lips, ears, and nostrils. Then the truth slapped him in the face as hard as the insanity of this entire situation: "She's dead," he whispered.

It was too much, too fast. All rationale escaped him; his psyche felt stuffed, like a Szechuan squid stuffed to bursting. Marie seemed to be on the verge of bursting too.

Movement churned beneath her pale, dead belly. Revulsion, shock, etc. cut Smith's spiritual tether, leaving only his objective remains: Smith the Coroner, Smith the Man Who Autopsies Dead People for a Living. It was impulse now. in this moment of intractable impossibility. He went for his old med school bag in the closet and his old CMS knife set.

Thoughts swarmed but he didn't really hear them. The sharp bivalving blade flashed.

"Aw, G.o.d," he muttered, cutting. "Aw, no." The incision stretched as he drew the gleaming blade from hip to hip, exuding a goulash of black lumps. She was a doll stuffed with beans. Out they poured as Smith watched, slow black lava sliding over the sides of the bed.

Lumps, he thought. The drum. The sludge.

The lumps began to dissolve, reverting to thin dark slime, upon their exposure to the air.

They crackled, sputtering. The stench rose like steam from a corpse-pit.

Lumps, he thought. My wife.

Dead lumps.

I wasn't a good boy. I wasn't ready.

The door swung open behind him. The thin shadow played across the floor. "Oh, Daddy, now look what you've done!" sniped the irritated little voice of his daughter. "You weren't ready, were you?"

"No," Smith muttered, thinking of the dream. "No, I wasn't. I'm sorry. I wasn't... ready."

"Daddy!" She scowled at him, arms crossed in her flannel pajamas. "You've been a bad boy."

"I-I know."

"Come on," she huffed. Her little hand led him from the bedroom, down the quiet stairs, and outside. Crickets trilled. Legions of fireflies s.h.i.+fted their tiny lights against a sultry evening. Smith, naked, enslimed, followed Jeannie down the hill behind his house.

The woods, he thought. The ravine. But hadn't Marie said that they'd taken the drum away?

"Hurry, Daddy!"

Branches scratched his face and chest but he didn't feel it. Dappled moonlight lit their progress; the forest was a labyrinth. With each step came more and more of some throbbing revelation, like Marie's abdominal wall before Smith had riven it open, and like the throbbing headache.

The ravine lay empty, save for crusts of the decontaminant foam they'd sprayed. Jeannie had to constantly wait up for him, like the time he'd taken her to the mall to see Santa.

But it was not Santa that awaited him now. Smith could feel it drawing on his brain, calling him...

The Father, came the strange thought.

"You were supposed to visit the Father first Daddy. But you didn't. And that's why the Mother's babies died in Mommy."

"Yes," Smith droned.

A hundred yards past the ravine Smith could see it A drum, identical to the first save that it was black instead of white. Black and white, Smith thought. Yin amd Yang. Mother and Father.

He gazed down.

Male and female.

Smith knelt before the drum. Its lid came unsealed at his touch-a wet pop! and a sucking sound. Into his naked lap poured a slew of squirming white bilge. Smith grinned. He ran his hands through the meaty-smelling muck, fascinated. Between his fingers wriggled the fresh white collops, the seed of the Father...

"It's still not too late, Daddy."

Yeah sure, Smith thought Of course!

The moonlight raged.

Jeannie nodded.

Smith put his face into the lumpen white slop, and began to eat. Jeannie lay on the carpet before the tv, her chin in her little hands. Star Trek was her favorite show. Thank G.o.d Bones had put Spock's brain back in last night.

Upstairs, Smith thrilled. "I don't believe it."

"What dear?'

"A black-throated blue warbler. Wow." Ah, well. He set down the binoculars and lay next to Donna in bed. It wouldn't be long now. She kissed him and smiled. Smith smiled too, and gently stroked the great gravid belly beneath the nightgown. It was bloated and lovely, stretched pin-p.r.i.c.k tight and so warm.

He put his ear to it and listened. He could hear them in there.

Donna fell asleep in his arms. Smith stroked the precious belly. He couldn't wait to see what came out.

The Wrong Guy.

"We sure made a mess of him," Wendlyn remarked.

Rena cut a wicked grin. "Yeah. Neat huh?'

Neither woman, by the way, wore panties. As they each leaned over the big opened trunk of the clay-red 76 Malibu, this fact would be obvious to any onlooker. Not that there would be any onlookers in proximity to the old Governor's Bridge at close to 4:30 in the morning. Nevertheless, the further over these two women leaned, the more of their backsides, i.e. rumps, i.e. glutius maximi, i.e. a.s.ses peeked out from beneath their shortish skirts. Rena wore tight blue leather. Wendlyn wore a more mature Ralph Lauren navy chino wrap.

"This one was fun," Rena said.

"Yeah," Wendlyn agreed. "A real scream, pun intended."

Rena giggled, '"One less pretty-boy motherf.u.c.ker to affront the society of women."

Moonlight dappled their well-lined backs and legs, wavering through high trees. An owl hooted. Below them, the gentle stream burbled over stones.

They both wore latex gloves as they tended to the corpse; just because they were impulsive didn't mean they were stupid. They'd read all about the state police carbon-dioxide lasers and special resin treatments that could lift fingerprints off human skin. No way these two gals were going to get caught. Wendlyn couldn't imagine anything more dreadful: doing life in the state slam, the dike wing. She was not adverse to the pleasures of a woman, but eating some 300-lb. cellblock mama's crusty cooze every night did not strike her as a pleasure. No, indeed.

"s.h.i.+t!" Rena suddenly fretted. "Where's hisa""

Wendlyn paused with the pliers, glaring. "G.o.d, you're so careless sometimes, Rena! You better find it! Did you leave it at the house?'

"Uha"" Rena blinked. "I don't think so."

"What about your purse? Did you put it in your purse?'

"Uuuuuuuuuuuh..."

"Rena, you should stand in front of a fan to change the air in your head! Honestly!"

"Well I'm sorry!" Rena whined, close to lacrimating. 'I don't remember what I did with it!"

Wendlyn shook her head. Kids, she dismissed. So unaware. Rena was only 23, and quite flighty sometimes. Wendlyn, six years older, viewed her in a sense as a sister, that is at least when they weren't licking up each other's v.a.g.i.n.al grooves. Sisters didn't generally partake in such practices. This was more an esoteric thing, a psychical/social bond, perhaps. They were sisters of the ether.

What had this one's name been? Will? Wendlyn thought. She'd never been good with names. Walt. There. That was it. They'd picked Walt up, without much effort, at Kaggies, one of the ruckus danceclubs downtown. Walt was one of those guys too good-looking for his own good. Rena and Wendlyn weren't too shabby themselves, mind you; they had the tackle to drag them in just as pretty as you please. Rena stood slim, trim, and alabaster-skinned, with short-cut s.h.i.+ny black hair. Wendlyn appeared more robust, a big, st.u.r.dy, curvaceous frame of plush flesh, with silken-straight white-blond hair, gem-blue eyes, and crisp tan lines. They rarely had trouble making a mark, and were always meticulously careful not to be seen leaving with a victim. Which might be worth pointing out now that not only were Wendlyn and Rena diverse, voracious, attractive, and highly s.e.xualized women, they were also what psychiatrists would clinically label as systematized stage sociopaths with acute erotomanic impulses. s.e.x killers would be a less articulate label. Murderesses. Pure a.s.s crazy psycho b.i.t.c.hes...

Their philosophy was societal and rather militant in its feministic design. Never mind that they were f.u.c.ked up in the head: abused, malnourished, and locked in closets as children, maladaptated via unbridled drug and alcohol use and hence damaged of certain critical brainreceptors, and, in general, rife with a plethora of environmentally-causated personality disorders and biogenic amine imbalances. They saw themselves instead as philosophers of the new dark age of s.e.xual terror, chameleon siren songs of the nihilistic '90's. They did not perceive men, for instance, as individuals but as a cyclic and conspiratorial consortium bent on the total subjugation, exploitation, and s.e.xual abuse of womanhood. They were pioneers of a sort, social guerrillas. Their manifesto was thus: since the beginning of civilization, man had freely and unconscionably exploited women.

It was high time, therefore, that someone started exploiting them back.

Which led them, in their zeal, to some particularly brow-raising extremities. Walt for example. Guilty by a.s.sociation. No doubt he'd exploited dozens, in not hundreds, of women with his looks and his phony charm. They'd taken him back to the house, for a "nightcap." Rena had his p.e.n.i.s out before they even made it to the bedroom, her deft little hand exploring away on the burgeoning meat. That's all men were to them. Meat. They shared the remote little rancher Wendlyn's father had left her after his unfortunate "suicide" back in 88. He'd pa.s.sed out drunk at his desk one night, after which Wendlyn had helped him along into the netherworld via a vintage Webley .455 revolver. Talk about a mess! And loud? Dad's brains looked like b.l.o.o.d.y chicken salad slopped across the fine lime and avocado print wallpaper. Anyway...

"Kinky babes, huh?' Walt had commented when Rena produced the four sets of handcuffs from the box under the bed. "You game?

They're just for atmosphere," she'd a.s.sured him, "Trick cuffs, see?' She put one on and demonstrated that a simple tug would release the locking ratchet. These cuffs in truth, however, were not trick cuffs at all but Peerless Model 26 police-issue detention cuffs, the Real McCoy, and what she hadn't shown the snide, c.o.c.ky-smiling, and now fully erect Walt was the tiny s.h.i.+m sjie kept pressed against the ratchet during her demonstration. In other words, unbeknownst to Walt, once they got him stripped down and cuffed to the big bra.s.s bed, he was in there for the long haul.

Rena and Wendlyn stripped each other then, while Walt watched ga-ga-eyed from his low comfy vantage point. He looked quite silly now, handcuffed to a bed with his p.e.n.i.s sticking up like a pulsing, tumescent root. "Yeah, this is h.e.l.l, ain't it?' Walt joked next when his two suitors commenced with the tongue bath. "Yeah, some tough life, I'll tell ya." Shut up, Wall, Wendlyn felt like saying, alternately licking his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Rena gave Walt's mouth something to do besides jabber, inserting a nipple into it and instructing, "Suck, Walt. Just keep quiet and suck." Walt sucked, with no reservations. Rena's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, i.e. hooters, i.e. rib melons, i.e. t.i.ts, were smallish yet quite interesting: pointed, with bounce, and ornamented by big distended brownish cones, while Wendlyn proved more conventional in regards to the mystic thing known as the human mammarian carriagea"a formidable rack of firm buoyant 38D's with large pink areolae and nipple ends akin to thimbles. An equal distinction existed, respective of the manner in which they maintained the outer geographies of their s.e.xual real estate. Rena had spent serious money electrolocizing the entirety of her pubis, while Wendlyn preferred a more unruly state of affairs, displaying a big, dense, extruding light-blond bush.

And it was into this same bush that next the shaft of Walt's s.e.xual architecture eagerly disappeared. Wendlyn very articulately responded "Oooooooo," to this gesture, as Rena m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to the frictive and delicious sensation of having her coney nipples sucked.

Wendlyn rode him awhile, then queried, "Ready, Rena?'

Out popped the nipple from Waifs lips. "Yeah," she said.

"Ready for what?' Walt breathily inquired as Wendlyn's gorgeous broad bottom continued to rise and plunge. It was her own curiosity that founded this latest escapade. During a short stint as a nursing a.s.sistant she'd read in the American Journal of Psychiatry an article about s.e.xual response during that ever rare occasion of Female-to-Male Rape. This article claimed that when threatened by death or grievous injury, the human body would respond to any demand that might increase the likelihood of survival. In other words, for instance, if a man with a gun to his head was told to f.u.c.k, by golly, those libidinal hormones would make d.a.m.n sure he was able to, maintaining an erection in spite of the undeniably non-arousing circ.u.mstances.

Only it was not a gun that Rena produced from the macabre toy box under the bed.

It was a pair of tin snips.

"Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t!" Walt yelled, as would most any man in this same predicament.

"Quiet Walt. And listen." Wendlyn eased all the way down on Walt's c.o.c.k, adroitly flexing her v.a.g.i.n.al muscles as she explained the details of this latest sociopathic supposition. "It's this simple. I'm going to f.u.c.k you, and if you go soft on me, Rena here will cut off your c.o.c.k with those tin snips. Is that perfectly clear?'

About the only thing perfectly clear to Walt just then was that he was in some s.h.i.+t of monumental depth. He responded quite stupidly, as men often do, by avoiding the question. He jerked his wrists against the cuffs and with great befuddlement exclaimed: "These aren't trick cuffs!"

"No, Walt they're not" Rena replied, displaying the hard-steel heavy-gauge snips. "And it doesn't look to me like there's a whole h.e.l.l of a lot you can do about that."

snip-snip, whispered the tin snips in the air.

Wendlyn, with lewd grin and narrowed eyes, soon found that the American Journal of Psychiatry was quite accurate in their claim. Walt's c.o.c.k, despite this freight of human terror, did not surrender one iota of its spongal turgidity. If anything, it grew even more stiff within the damp, excited confines of Wendlyn's reproductive channel, i.e. v.a.g.i.n.al pa.s.s, i.e. birth ca.n.a.l, i.e. p.u.s.s.y. Rena, meanwhile, opened and closed the tin snips before Wait's bulging eyeb.a.l.l.s, explicating, "We're killers, Walt"a" snip-snip-snipa""we're psycho-s.e.xual killers" a" snip-snip-snipa""and we've murdered over a dozen men in the last year." snip-snip-snip. "I'll bet that makes your c.o.c.k just want to go limp as an overcooked noodle, hmmm?"

Walt's c.o.c.k did no such thing, remaining stiff as a polished nightstick. Wendlyn leaned forward in her greedy straddle, accelerating the pace of the congress until her flexing, well-lubricated loins gave way in luscious throbbing thrumming o.r.g.a.s.m...

"There," Rena consoled, smiling down between her unique, elongated b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She patted his tummy.

Wendlyn climbed off. "You did it Walt. You're a standup guy." "Yuh-yuh-you're gonna let me go now, right?' Walt asked. "Nuh-nuh-no, Walt," Rena answered. "We're going to cut your c.o.c.k off"

Walt was quite understandably outraged by this bit of information, and he began to snap his ankles and wrists madly, and quite uselessly, against their stainless steel fetters, blubbering: "Buh-buh-but you said if I didn't guh-guh-go soft, yuh-yuh-you wouldn'ta"

"Don't be a doe-doe, Walt," Rena suggested, delighted by his state of prostrate and inescapable horror. "Don't be stupid"

Wendlyn's pretty face grew alight in the knowing grin, "We just got done telling you that we're killers, and if we're killers, it only stands to reason that we're probably liars, too."

The tin snips slowly opened, like jaws.

Walt began to scream, as Rena began to snip.

Which left them now in their current quandary, at precisely 4:26 in the morning, parked on the old Governor's Bridge. Rena desperately rummaged through the Malibu's cargo-hold-sized trunk. Where was it? Where was Walt's d.i.c.k?

Rena started crying.

"Oh, now," Wendlyn tried to soothe her, rubbing her back. "Don't worry about it. It's not like he can be identified by his c.o.c.k."

This was true, unless of course the police had some secret new system of genital identification. Wendlyn smiled to herself. Perhaps one day she'd open the fridge and see a picture of Walt's d.i.c.k printed on a milk carton. There were, however, some other things that Walt definitely could be identified by. thirty-two of which Wendlyn now went to considerable effort to take care of. Before the nursing job, she'd been a dental technician, but that didn't make the task of extracting Walt's teeth any less laborious. The pliers were difficult to manipulate in such limited oral s.p.a.ce. Eventually, though, she managed to get them all out of Walt's dead maw, whereupon she placed them all into a small cloth sack.

Rena was still crying, rummaging. She was checking the tool box, for G.o.d's sake, and the plastic cooler they used when they went to the beach. "Oh, Wendy, I'm sorry! Where could it be? Did I leave it on the dresser with the keys? The kitchen counter?"

"Rena, I told you. Forget about his c.o.c.k. Here. Help me get him out"

They travailed then to lifting out the plastic dropcloth in which the deader-than-dogs.h.i.+t Walt had been carefully becloaked. Rena hammered the little bag of teeth against the asphalt with a four-pound sledge, until all were sufficiently pulverized. Wendlyn, meanwhile, removed the gla.s.s flask (one of many perks of working in a hospital) and emptied its teeming contents onto Walt's remaining identifiable features. The concentrated nitric acid made short work of the hands and feet fizzing away any and all ridge prints, loops, whorls, and bifurcations. Walt's face, too, bubbled away with equal steaming vigor.

The unappreciated separation of his genitals from his groin, by the way, had not of itself spelled Walt's demise. He'd screamed loud and hard as a horn on a semi-rig, thras.h.i.+ng amid his Peerless-handcuff trap, but had surprisingly not died. Nor had Wendlyn's delvings with the Clay Adams brand bivalving scalpel done the trick. It got quite ugly, Walt screaming like that, and thras.h.i.+ng away with no p.e.n.i.s. Blood gushed like Great Falls. Eventually Rena had stuck a knitting needle up his nose, driving it back with her palm deep into the meat of Walt's parietal lobe. She'd jiggled it around a few times, until he checked out.

"Ashame about his face," Rena lamented now, looking down in the moonlight. "He could've been on the cover of GQ."

"Not anymore. Fangoria, maybe. Say goodnight, Walt."

They hefted up either end of the dropcloth and rolled it over the rusty metal bridge rail.