James Callan

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?