Kissing Carrion Read Online Free PDF Page A

past midnight, the zero hour. Showtime. Lyle’s customers file in as he sets up the cameras, trance-silent with anticipation: Stoned suburbanites, jaded superfan ultra-scenesters, unsocialized Western
otaku
with bad B.O. and worse fashion sense. Teens who followed the wrong set of memes and ended up somewhere way too cool for school, let alone anywhere else. Many seem breathless, barely able to sit still. Some—few, thankfully—have actually brought dates, rummaging absently between each other’s thighs as they lick their lips, eyes firmly on the prize: The Bone Machine itself, a slumped mantis of hooks and cords; Pat, strapping “my” body in for its final run around Ray’s block, suturing it fast with duct tape. Slipping the requisite genital prosthetic mini-bladder tube up the corpse’s urethral tract and pumping it erect before condoming the whole package shut once more . . .
    The Machine—model number five, re-built on site by Pat herself, due to be broken down to component parts and blueprints when the spectacle’s dollar-value finally wears itself thin—occupies a discontinued butchering lab somewhere in the Hospitality area of a shut-down community college campus: Ray’s coin bought a deal with security guards who let them in at night after the campus manager goes home, as well as access to a walk-in fridge/freezer just big enough to keep their mutual “carrionette” pliant. It’s a vast, slick cave of a place whose dark-toned walls are hung with 1960’s charts of cartoon pigs and cows tattooed with dotted “cut here” lines, whose sloping concrete floor still sports drains and runnels to catch blood already congealed into forty years’ worth of collective grease-stink. Under the heat of Lyle’s lights the air is hot and close, smell thick enough to cut: Meat, sweat, anticipation.
    Transgression a-comin’. That all-purpose po/mo word poseurs of every description love so well. But there are all kinds of transgressions, aren’t there? Transgression against society’s standards, the laws of God and man, against others, against yourself . . .
    Here’s Pat, gearing up—eyes intent, face studiously deadpan. Here’s Lyle, all sleaze and charm, spinning his strip-club barker’s spiel. Here’s “me,” slug-pale and seeping slightly, yet already beginning to stir as the connections flare, the cables pull, the hip-pistons give a tentative little preliminary thrust and grind. And—
    â€”here’s Ray, nude, gleaming with antibacterial gel. Right on cue.
    See the man, see the corpse. See the man see the corpse. See the man? See the
corpse
?
    Okay, then.
    . . . let’s get this party started, shall we?
    Jolt forward, pixilate, zoom in—not much foreplay, at this stage of the game. Just wind and wipe into Ray bent l-shaped and hooking his heels in the small of my jouncing avatar’s back, clawing passion-sharp down its slack sides. Pat puppets the Machine’s load forward, digging deep, straining for that magic buried trigger; Ray scissors himself and “me” together even harder, so hard I hear something crack. And blood comes welling: Fluid, anyway, tinged darker with decay. Blood already starbursting the cilia of “my” upturned eyes, broken vessels knit in a pinky-red wash of old petechial hemorrhaging—
    Ray groaning, teeth bared. Lyle leaning in for the all-important E.C.U. Pat, bent to the board, her hair lank and damp across her frowning forehead.
    Ray, grabbing at “my” hair, feeling its mooring slip and slide like rotten chicken-skin. Taking a big, biting tug at “my” bile-soaked lower lip, swapping far more than spit, before rearing back again for a genuine chomp. Starting to—
chew
.
    Pat gags:
Ewwww
, rubbery. You kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?
    (Not any more, I guess.)
    First the bottom lip, then the upper. A bit of “my”