Welcome to Reptilia

An Excerpt from “Double Dicks or Double Down,” a choose-your-own-sex-adventure novel

First glance: Black sand, white surf. Komodo dragons in designer suits—Armani, red lapels.

“Welcome to Reptilia.” The space pod computer spoke in a sexless, spiritless monotone.

I recoiled from the porthole window. Took a breath. Let curiosity out-wrangle my disgust. Allowed myself another peek.

Two-inch talons sheathed in diamond. Maybe glass? They sparkled. Pretty, gaudy, costume jewels. Knock-offs. They curled at the end of scaled fingers, pinning cigars or raking prey or tweaking the strings of strange instruments (some sort of oversized lute, pearl inlaid, maybe bone)

Lizards. Lots of them. Doing what? Gyrating, for a start. Moaning. Singing? And was that dancing? Was it epilepsy? They twerked or did the hula on the beach. They had no grace, but the stars as my witness, they made up for it with effort. The males swung their two-headed genitalia, their double penises famed among the Varanus, the monitor lizards that ruled the third moon.

I felt sick watching them. But that simmered into wonder, eventually boiling into arousal. It was all so gross and stimulating and wrong, which made it right—for me.

The porthole window fogged up with my heavy breathing as I watched the grotesque lizards spasm on the black, volcanic sand. They stood like men, bipedal, bowlegged freaks. Although, leaning back, supported by their strong tails, the dragons were almost tripodal. Others, with  their bellies on the sand, acted like quadrupeds, crawling, writhing, dirtying their fancy blazers while snapping their maws at scurrying crabs, or nothing at all, ghosts or inner demons.

“It’s a mating ritual.” Eliza joined me at the window. She clutched a gun—what else is new? For each unlucky bastard I was forced to kill along the way—believe me, plenty—Eliza had killed seven or eight, maybe ten. Sure, she was quick to kill, a real trigger happy bitch, but I wasn’t complaining. Her killing sprees had saved me more than once.

“Do you plan on shooting them?”

“There’s no charge,” she told me.

“That’s good, cause I’m broke.”

“I mean the power cell,” she corrected me. “Gun’s dead. It’s just a prop.”

“Fan-bloody-tastic.”

She pushed me aside, pressing against the glass. “Look at those lizards go.”

“Gives me the willies,” I told her. “In all the right ways,” I did not add.

Eliza was quick to kill. Me? I was quick to drop my pants, to fuck the next alien in the wide, weird cosmos. By some miracle, I had yet to contract an STD, a stellar transmitted disease.

“The heebie-fucking-jeebies,” Eliza agreed.

Our cheeks touched as we crammed our faces together, crowding the porthole window. We looked down to the black sand below, the incoming tide lapping at the cracked, lizard skin of gold-banded ankles. Gold leaf flaked from scaled arms, expensive snow drifting on a warm, sea breeze. Ceremonial paint chipped to fall into the foaming suds of incoming ocean surf. The gas giant, Leviathan, pulled the freshwater oceans of Reptilia without reservation. The tide came quick and hard. Crabs skittered into the pockmarked burrows in the sand. The dragons tucked away their double penises and ran to the edge of gloomy, jungle terrain.

As the sea advanced, rising to engulf our space pod, the porthole splashed with agitated water, churning white, then calmed to a sedate, tranquil blue. Fish swam past. Cichlids, or something similar. Lizards too. They hunted and they played. They pressed their yellow eyes against the glass and watched two humans watch them.

“Full opacity,” Eliza commanded the computer, and the view faded to black.

In private, in a capsule at the bottom of a freshwater ocean, Eliza and I whittled away the hours until the low tide would return. We ate and slept and fucked. We talked a little. But when we did, it was filler. Mundane stuff. Idle chit-chat. Neither of us asked the real question, what was really on our minds. Neither of us mentioned the word, the nature of our predicament: exile. Neither of us were willing to put to question what we feared to know the answer to: just how badly, exactly, were we fucked?

Story At Midnight

Night had a way of pressing itself into the bones of the cabin, as if the woods themselves were leaning in to listen.

Max Sciller sat in the dim wash of a single lamp, the light trembling against the walls like something afraid to stay. Once, his face had been familiar—measured, calm, the trusted voice of Richmond, Virginia flickering through living rooms at six and eleven. Now, that same face stared back at him in the black mirror of the window—thinner, hollowed, eyes sunk deep as if something inside had been eating him slowly.

He hadn’t left the mountain in months.

Didn’t need to.

Didn’t want to.

The world beyond the trees felt like a fever dream he’d barely survived.

A sound cut through the stillness.

A scream.

Sharp. Human.

Max froze, head tilting, breath caught halfway between doubt and recognition. Then he exhaled slowly, shaking his head.

“No,” he muttered. “Not tonight.”

The doctor had warned him about auditory hallucinations. Stress. Isolation. The mind filling its own void.

Another scream—longer this time, ragged, dragged across the forest like torn cloth.

Max pressed his palms against his temples.

“Not real.”

He said it again, quieter, as if speaking too loudly might make it true.

The woods went still.

Then came the scratching.

At first it was faint, like branches brushing the cabin. Then it grew deliberate. Fingernails on wood. Slow. Curious.

Max stood, heart beginning to stutter.

He moved toward the door, each step hesitant, like walking toward a memory he wasn’t sure he owned.

“Hello?” he called out.

Silence.

Then—breathing.

Not his.

Close.

Right outside.

Max’s throat tightened. His mind raced through explanations—animals, wind, echoes of his own pulse—but none of them held.

The doorknob turned.

Not fully.

Just enough to test.

Max stumbled back.

The door opened.

They slipped in like shadows peeling themselves from the night.

Thin. Filthy. Pale shapes wrapped in rags and animal skins, their faces smeared with something dark that caught the light wrong—too thick to be dirt. Their eyes gleamed with a wet, knowing hunger.

There were too many of them.

They moved without sound, circling him, breathing him in.

Max shook his head violently.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered. “You’re not real.”

One of them laughed—a dry, cracking sound like breaking bone.

“Oh, we’re real,” a voice said.

The leader stepped forward.

He was taller than the rest, his face almost human beneath the grime, though his smile stretched too far, as if it had forgotten its natural limits.

“We’ve been watching you, Max.”

Max’s stomach dropped.

“You know my name.”

“We know everything about you.”

The leader tilted his head, studying him like something fragile and fascinating.

“The man who talks to himself. The man who hears things. The man no one would believe.”

Max’s breath came fast now.

“This is a delusion,” he insisted. “You’re not here.”

The leader smiled wider.

“Then why is she?”

They dragged her forward.

Max’s world shattered.

“Emily?”

His sister’s face was bruised, eyes wide with terror, mouth gagged. Tears carved clean lines down her dirt-streaked cheeks.

“She came looking for you,” the leader said softly. “Such a sweet thing. So worried.”

Max staggered toward her, but the circle tightened.

“No—no, this isn’t—this isn’t happening—”

“Isn’t it?”

The leader stepped closer, lowering his voice.

“We live out here, Max. We survive. We take care of our own.”

He gestured to the others, who watched with quiet anticipation.

“You’ve been alone for so long. No one to understand you. No one to hear what you hear.”

Max’s eyes flicked between them, between Emily, between the door.

“You belong with us.”

Emily shook her head violently, muffled cries spilling from behind the gag.

Max’s hands trembled.

“I’m not like you.”

The leader leaned in, his breath sour and warm.

“You already are.”

Silence stretched.

The woods seemed to hold it in place.

Then the leader placed something in Max’s hand.

A knife.

Cold. Heavy. Real.

Max stared at it.

At Emily.

At the circle closing tighter.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered again, but the words sounded weak now. Fragile.

The leader’s voice slipped into something almost gentle.

“Prove it.”

Max’s breathing slowed.

Something inside him shifted—not snapping, but settling, like a puzzle piece finding its place.

All the doubt. All the noise. The endless questioning.

Gone.

He looked at Emily.

Really looked.

Saw the fear.

The pleading.

The recognition.

Then something colder rose to meet it.

Clarity.

“If this is in my head,” Max said softly, “then none of this matters.”

The leader smiled.

Emily screamed behind the gag as Max stepped forward.

The knife moved quicker than thought.

A single, clean motion.

The sound it made was small.

Too small.

Her body crumpled at his feet.

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then the woods erupted in laughter.

Wild. Exultant. Hungry.

Max stood there, staring down at what he’d done, waiting for it to dissolve—for the illusion to break, for the cabin to return to quiet madness.

But it didn’t.

The blood stayed.

The smell stayed.

The bodies around him stayed.

The leader placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Welcome home, Max.”

Max didn’t answer.

After a long moment, he smiled.

And this time, it stretched just a little too far.

Jack With a Beer Back

“Alright. Maybe a bar was the worst place in the world for me to be at that point. It was late, real late, and there were only shambling bar wrecks there. And me. Me, with a Modern Lit paper hanging over my head—remember, I was actively striving toward a degree back then—and no idea, no idea at all, how to do it.  Except that I figured on doing Kerouac or Fitzgerald because I liked drinking. 

“So I got to talking to Kevin, the bar-keeper, about it. Mostly about Kerouac and how it was impossible to know the real man from the lines of all the books and biographies. I railed against the biographies in particular.  Telling Kevin about how they were written in such adulatory states that all the grit of the man seemed to be cleaned away and replaced with some sani-clean aura that no linger smelled of old kitchen tables and Benzedrine sweat. 

“I was really adamant about it. As adamant as a half drunk sophomore can get. Drunks shuffled by. More beers came and this guy sat down across from me.”

I waited a moment. For effect.

“He didn’t look like much to me. Big homespun face, boilermaker slack, hanging pale and vaguely ham-like above an old faded red-flannel shirt. His hands were swollen, his eyes were sort of half shut. He looked like every hero of every Bukowski poem ever written. He leaned over the table that divided us—an old, beery, dinged-up wooden table with the shellac coming off—and he whispered:

“‘I am the grit that lies in all the gutters of all the streets that sprawl crazy over the earth. I am the old beer and creepy graveyard dim cold blast of smelly sweaty workingman’s bar that hits you BAM! in the face when you walk by and some crazy old bum opens the door.’

“He breathed his drunk’s breath on me during this.  Beer, spit, germs of uncoughed coughs, old sour teeth. That breath came over the table. His face leering closer and closer, mine leaning further and further back against my chair. I didn’t want to MAKE him go away, I wanted him to just FORGET ME and drift away. To leave me alone. To zero in on some other sucker.

“He inhaled. He put both hands—big fleshy hands, the hands of a gone soft drunk—on the table and sat back. Quiet. Looking at me. Then, with that exaggerated dignity drunks assume when they feel patronized, he said:

“‘Ask me some questions.’

“And he put his hands down on his knees.

““Ask you what?” I was tired. Too tired for what looked like an alcoholic sermon on life’s lessons and grand schemes gone bad.

“’You wanted to know me. Smell me.’

““No, I can’t”, I said “I’ve got a really—“

“’Smell me!’ He pushed forward in his chair. ‘Kitchen tables. Benzedrine. Old typewriter ribbons. Smell me.’

“That tooth-beer-spit breath combo hit me again. I picked up my lighter. He grabbed my hand. I jerked. He lurched forward into my face.

“’It’s me.’

“’Okay.’

“’You want to know me? Ask me.’

“He sat back suddenly, his eyes steadier than his hands.  He turned to Kevin.

“’Two Jacks with beer backs.’

“’You buying?’

“’I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at me.…and you think I’m just another bum. Just a bum with broken down shoes and stinking breath.  A stinking breath drunk that sits in bars and breathes his stinking breath…’

“He was getting loud.  I didn’t want him to know that I had been thinking about his breath. So I quickly disagreed.

““No. No. I didn’t think that.”

“And I smiled warmly so I’d look honest.

“He waved his huge hand in front of his chest.

“’S’okay. S’okay. S’long as you find out. …you find out who I am.’  He coughed, and stopped talking—politely—as Kevin put the drinks on the table and dumped the ashtray. Kevin moved on.  The guy picked up the shot glass and raised it. Not a tremor. He said:

“’This is to me. This is to all that is left of me. Jack with a beer back.’

“He laughed a sort of snort/chuckle/cough laugh and he threw back the shot.

“’Benzedrine and wine bottles and little dead cats in Mexican streets and now…now here….here it is.’

“He slapped the shot glass down.

“Then he started talking slow and started to sway. He pushed at the little glass in front of me.

“’C’mon. Drink. Drink it in. Jack with a beer back…’

“He burped. Rubbed his lips with the big knuckles of his hand. And then he threw up. Threw up stuff that looked like rotted baby food. Clots of phlegm. Beer yeast. I don’t know what it was. And the smell. The smell of it coming up past the rotten mouth, over the rotted teeth… It was like every bad smell molecule in the world coming together to tug at your stomach’s pit and test your gag reflexes. It smelled so bad it hurt trying not to throw up, not to look, not to breathe…

“Instinct carried me up and away. I was at the far end of the bar—by the jukebox and the popcorn machine where the other bums were—before the first drops hit the floor. Most of the bums didn’t notice, but a couple of them looked at me. I pretended I had no idea why.

“Kevin was throwing bar towels and disinfectant over the bum and the table. The barkeeper looked over my way, held up my beer. Not the shot, the beer, I don’t even want to know what happened to the shot. And he said:

“’Do you want this?’

“He was being serious. My throat pulled with a gag jerk.

““No.” I said.

“A little after that I went home.”

Jo lit a Marlboro, dragged at it and exhaled.

“Jack with a beer back, huh?”

“As God is my witness,” I said, “Do you want another beer?”