Franco’s Grand Finale

Tonight’s show promised much. He needed it to be special because he had to entice as many of those jaded appetites as possible to his grand finale in Costa Rica. He’d already spent money in preparation and had a team on call. Thank God for narcotraffickers. Their genetic mix of Aztec cruelty and Spanish conquistador bloodlines made for some of his most imaginative episodes. Acid eyedroppers, dismemberments, but the best of the collage were definitely his acquisitions from his contact in Jalisco, one of the more infamous of the cartel los polozeros or stewmakers, who dissolved victims in fifty-five-gallon barrels of acid. He’d added a short strip of film from the seventies featuring Iran’s SAVAK police torturing victims by impalement with a rotating screw. Grainy but still serviceable. The nineties stuff from the Serbia conflict was less in vogue but was plentiful, if one searched hard enough or paid the right people, such as that gem from the Chetniks or maybe Arkan’s Tigers. Two Muslim men stripped, tied in the 69 position, and ordered to snap with teeth at each other’s testicles—or be shot immediately.  He had a new sequence from Burkina Faso that promised to please even those barely twitched a muscle during showings. 

His fat sociology professor’s forehead would be a sheen of sweat after that one, no doubt. He should quote Goethe to him, watch his reaction: “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.”    

His problem was the relentless competition of the dark web. Garden-variety executions in Africa weren’t good enough nowadays. Every teenager with access to Tor or any number of anonymizing browsers could get his glut of executions, murders, impalements, torture porn, and whatever human beings can do to one another that qualified as bestial, although that was both inaccurate and dishonest regarding the animal kingdom. 

One day he predicted he’d have to contend with AI’s prowess. The computer-generated pixel definition of modern filmmaking was no match for the real thing as yet. One could always detect slippage in the seams between background and the action on screen. An impaled victim being carried by men over rough terrain required a synchronicity of millions of photons to duplicate; and the application of quantum mechanics to this art was just on the horizon. He would branch out eventually if he wanted to demand the fees he asked. There were always going to be yachts in the world from Monte Carlo through Charlotte Amalie to Oranjestad where the rich gathered to imbibe and savor delicacies not meant for the common palate. He had provided those culinary delights at the highest possible cost in denominations that made him as knowledgeable about world currencies as any senior forex trader in Manhattan.

* * *

The kudos filtered to him as each checked out. The heiress from Brussels was especially fulsome over the Taliban stoning in Afghanistan. She wore Sock’s mask, the complement to Buskin’s tragedy. 

Culling from Middle East for newer selections had not gone well lately. His German muttered something about Chop-Chop Square being as dull as dishwater if he translated correctly. He did, however, express his hope that next month’s grand finale would prove a “showstopper.” He used the odd word Publikumshit, which made the ignoramus from NYU giggle. 

On the upside, he knew he’d never run short of victims. The world had wars going on every day all over the place. Civil wars, drug wars, terrorist insurgencies. Violence bloomed on the planet in every direction like poison sumac in an abandoned orchard. He wondered what they’d think if they knew that their favorite stylist Franco in their swanky shop in the UES was the ringmaster of a decadent carnival of horrors. If it weren’t for bitcoin, he’d never be able to pull it off. How could he have acquired or paid for those exquisite screenings for his other clientele at night? Death and murder were commodities nowadays. 

Having flunked out of Cardoza Law his second year when he left Dullsville, Indiana for New York, he roamed the streets looking for opportunities. Growing up in his mother’s beauty shop back in Terre Haute, he was familiar with the techniques and terminology of cutting hair. He hated the stink of the place. It lingered in his dreams. By the time he was a senior, his mother dragooned him into working as an apprentice. By year’s end, he was doing elaborate styles for her pickiest customers and facing a gauntlet of bullies who called him “fag” and “homo” and tried to make his life miserable. Being tall and possessed of wiry strength for his age, he ended the torment by confronting the biggest boy after school. He wore an Ace bandage over his right hand all week despite having no injury. On the day he confronted the biggest of the bullies, he wore junk rings on each finger beneath the bandage. He broke the kid’s jaw and immediately discarded the rings before the cops arrived. He earned a ten-day suspension but had the respect of the others.  

A crash course in the newest trends in women’s hair styling, paid for by the sale of his law school texts and taught by a girl with pink hair he met in a Soho club, he called himself Franco when he interviewed with the flirty owner. A recent vacancy and his moxie did the rest. Besides gossip, he picked up psychology in the three years he plied the despised trade, always smiling and greeting his clients, the lonely, middle-aged women whose husbands neglected them for their high-powered work in the skyscrapers. They were devoted to him despite the rough start and some botched cuts the owner scolded him for: “Your ladies saved you, Franco,” he sputtered. “That last one left looking like Daryl Hannah in Bladerunner.” 

He paid for the truck, camera, film equipment, camping equipment, every item required for the production to be carried out to meticulous specifications, not to mention the mordida or the baksheesh—all the words in all the languages for the bribes and payoffs of officials. He didn’t stint. Twenty-two percent of his proceeds went into the upcoming Big Show down in Costa Rica. His black book of names and call phone numbers was a 5-by-7-inch leatherbound file of hell.

Did he think about the victims? They might not have deserved their horrible ends in every instance, but they were born to their destinies as surely as he was born to his. As Arabs love to say, Inshallah: If Allah wills it. 

And who racks up a bigger body count than God?

* * *

Every single one of his clientele paid in full. He knew that many of them would get so sexually aroused at these screenings that masturbation was impossible to resist. He had to block out an image of his professor grunting and briefly exposing his cockhead as he pleasured himself. The man was on thin ice. One more violation and he would tap him into oblivion from his keyboard.

Meanwhile, this, his latest obra de arte. He had four men working for him: a Bahamian, a Russian émigré, an American expat—a fugitive from Dallas, actually—currently living in Costa Rica, and a young Spaniard, who used to be a bellhop.  

He assembled his team in the capital San José and drilled them on their duties. He handed each man a fat envelope and spoke the cliché of thriller films he watched as a youth: “Half now, half later.” He promised a bonus if the “job” went beyond day five. All they knew was that “a bad man who molested children” was going to die and that he was ordered to film it for the narco boss back in Tamaulipas, who ordered the man’s execution in a precise but peculiar way. “He has all our names, by the way,” Franco said, using his stylist alias. 

He found his expat Curtis there, drunk in a bar wearing a weathered cowboy hat; his bare arms sported Special Forces tattoos. La Carpio, the city’s most dangerous slum, was another recruiting center, which produced Charles Williams, his Bahamian fleeing from a rape charge in Aruba. Thirty thousand desperate citizens crammed between a reeking landfill of raw sewage and a pair of polluted rivers. Curtis led him to the Russian deserter Evgeni and the young Spaniard Mario, a slim boy with doe eyes, who stabbed a staff member in his hotel in Mallorca to death with a flick knife.  

Costa Rica’s central interior met the most important criteria in his months-long search. It was far away from the coastal tourist traps, its interior was ideal for both isolation and the presence of secluded mangrove swamps born of extinct volcanoes millions of years ago. The Pan-American highway was another bonus, for it met his criterion for an easy and anonymous means of transporting goods and equipment without arousing suspicion. He adopted the guise of a film crew doing a documentary of the country’s wildlife among the native grasses, cane, and marshlands north of Limomal and Highway 21. His crew was issued identification cards and passports that said that was who they were. He paid royally for the paperwork from his Amsterdam forger, knowing it needed to stand up to close inspection.

Caño Negro was his number-one choice for its aquatic life and insect populations dwelling in hidden pockets of marshland. Tropical forests teemed with shrieking monkeys and striped, ant-eating tamanduas. The mud banks crawled with Spectacled Caimans, black river turtles, and jesus christ lizards. The trouble there was that it was also frequented by tourists taking a swamp safari near the Nicaraguan border at Los Chiles. For what he filmed, privacy was the sine qua non.

His extensive and esoteric reading in a narrow field yielded methods of execution humanity had relegated to compartments in the lizard brain of the human species, never to be resurrected. The one he envisioned for his swan song before retirement was a variation of the classic medieval Wheel. The breaking of bones and crushing of internal organs was viscerally appealing but one had to project a certain amount of imagination to gain the full effects. Witnessing limbs rendered pliant through breaking and woven into the giant wheel’s spokes like a daisy chain was dramatic, to be sure, but still a mere tour de force in contrast to this one. Nothing could approach this year’s spectacle, a horror known as scaphism—literally, “anything hollowed out.” 

Found in Plutarch’s biography of King Artaxerxes II and known colloquially as “the boats,” it’s really death by bugs. As a method of execution, it was horrifically intense and the victim suffered beyond measure, often for days. You had it all—the visual, the auditory, and not least, the olfactory rolled into one. The pungent marsh odors mixed with the festering rot of gaping wounds.

For his magnum opus, he envisioned a four- to six-day fiesta unless silence issuing form the boats suggested the screams had either stopped for good or the occupant was lingering in a cocoon of madness beyond reach. At the end of the fourth day, he would assume his clients were sated. Curtis would be handed a Smith & Wesson .460 Magnum with silver Glaser slugs with No. 12 birdshot and polymer tips to blast the boat and its contents to smithereens, a grand finale of sorts. 

The man who was to star in the performance came from Matamoros and would arrive by helicopter courtesy of the Gulf cartel. It would be guided by satellite GPS to a spot prepared by his team in advance. All he knew was that the man had run afoul of someone in that organization and didn’t ask many questions when he offered to buy him. He thought it pathetic that human life was cheap, but he knew that a man’s life in some of the world’s worst prisons was far less expensive than what he had paid his contact for this wretched soul. Mercifully, he would not know his fate until he was nailed into his floating coffin. Alas, he could not offer the man the solace of numbing drugs on his final journey to oblivion because his demanding clientele would expect to hear the full-throated screams echoing around the secluded mangrove and rainforest.

The second part of the trip off the Pan-American Highway wound through miles of jungle hilltop and ended a mile from the spot where they would set up for satellite internet, uneventful. The problems were manageable in that remote region but latency was a factor he hoped to circumvent with filler. Nothing he could do about the lag in real-time transmission. Clarity of pixel definition wad all and it was ninety-five percent of anything he sent from San José. His crew riding in back was silent except for Mario, a loquacious lad who chattered like one of the monkeys in the canopy. The truck disturbed the silence of the jungle. 

Only Mario refused to be filmed for the B-roll filler once they were masked. He gave each a different mask so that he could issue the right orders to the right man. Hand gestures would do for most of it but out here in the jungle, he couldn’t plan for every contingency. A jaguar might wander into camp. Several dozens of species of poisonous arachnid abounded, many aggressive. Pretty Poison Dart Frogs looked like ceramic gewgaws in a curio shop in Chelsea but touch one and see what happens to your bloodstream. His biggest fear was the deadly Fer de Lance, a snake so common to the jungle and so good at camouflage in the foliage that you’d see it at the same time it had already buried its fangs in you. But as Curtis said in his awful twang, “You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.” Of his four-man team, he had least trust in his fellow American despite the paycheck he offered for a week’s work. 

Nothing he could do about the slower browsing speed of satellite internet as data traveled between their data and the overhead satellite. He’d paid a king’s ransom for the set-up and equipment, only the best. His Sony FX6 was a tough one to handle and unforgiving of novice mistakes, not even intermediate friendly. He needed a camera with excellent post-production options for those sales that would come later. He smiled. Just like the Met offering a disk of Swan Lake after the show. Knowing how his clients relished his shows, he regretted not including this “bonus offer” years ago.        

Once the tents were set up and the internet established and working, he told them to take a case of honey and spring water out of the truck. The rest of the food and supplies would remain stored under the canvas cover along with his gun safe. 

He had to time giving out passwords with the international time zones affecting the order of the  give-outs. He wasn’t a charity. No freebies.

Evgeni, his twenty-year-old deserter from the Ukraine War, was unloading the last of the supplies and the two boats he’d purchased in from fishermen in Puntarenas for Day One. The midday heat and humidity was stifling. By mid-afternoon, it would be a sweat-soaked endeavor to do even small tasks. Busy, busy. Keep busy. You know the order, he told himself. He had mapped out every detail for weeks working alone in his apartment.

Finally, every one of his clients acknowledged the password and time to check in. They knew nothing other than that Franco’s event was to be spectacular, unforgettable, and satisfying to the deepest cockles of every viewer’s being. His one regret was that he allowed the fat professor to subscribe for the password at the last second. The man had scraped up the ten-thousand-dollar admission fee somehow and was irate that he was almost shut out because of the “exorbitant fee being demanded.” 

He and Curtis left to meet the helicopter bringing them their man. Hot-road mirages of water appeared and disappeared every ten miles. Curtis carried the big revolver in a side holster and had been instructed where to stand throughout the handoff. He’d dealt with narcotraffickers and their minions many times through intermediaries, rarely in person. He didn’t want to be surprised.

The small black chopper landed in the glade twenty minutes late, its blades beating back the thick undergrowth of ferns. The man facing the rarest of deaths was led out by two men in camouflage carrying AR-15s while the pilot kept the rotors in motion. The man wore a black hood and belly shackles. Franco handed the man another envelope fat with currency. His jefe already had the down payment in bitcoin. Hobbled by his shackles, the man stumbled beside Curtis who shook him by the shoulder and slapped the back of his head. He led him, groaning to the truck where he and Franco hoisted him into the bed. Curtis tied him down to the eyebolts he’d welded into the truck. 

“What’s his name?” Curtis asked when he had him secured.

“Call him Pablo,” Franco said. “I don’t give a shit.”

“God damn it, the assholes doped him,” Franco muttered. He’d insisted to his contact in Matamoros that the man be alert and responsive. “We might have to delay the feeding.” Stupid thugs.

Back in camp, they lifted him down gently and walked him over to the boats where Evgeni and Charles stood by with claw hammers and nails. Their shirts were soaked in front and under their arms from the intense heat. Charles used his bandanna to swat mosquitoes which showed for the unexpected feast of warm bipeds offering blood for their babies.

“Not yet,” Franco said. “We have to film this part, too. Get your masks on.”

Idiots. He had to repeat every order ten times . . . 

The slow-motion dullness of moving through the waves of jungle heat and blinding glare was maddening with flies and mosquitoes drawn to warm blood. Franco applied his ND filter to the lens to obviate glare, adjusted his f/stop for normal shutter speed. Charles and Mario were administering the first dose of water mixed with Caro syrup and honey to Pablo’s mouth, held open by a Jennings mouth gag. 

Then the gods who love the surreal stepped in; time warped into a slow-motion French farce. Three birders in boonie hats, toting binoculars, and notebooks, blundered out of the jungle chatting excitedly among themselves. They stopped in their tracks when the spotted the camp. They simply appeared from a path no one noticed before because of the dense foliage. Curtis, wary of Interpol’s red alert to the point of paranoia, thought they were policia, unholstered his weapon and began firing at the trio before Franco could open his mouth.

The foremost birder took a torso hit. A Glaser slug, being a fragmentation bullet, doesn’t go far up a ballistics gelatin block but the round won’t penetrate the wall to kill an occupant in the next room. There’s no such thing as a nick or a graze. The expanding shot inside removes whole limbs on contact and implodes intestines and internal organs. The middle-aged birder with his white beard and pot belly died on impact. The other male birder to his right dropped his backpack and tried to flee back into the jungle. Curtis’ shot took him in the back of the head and removed the upper portion, revealing the white cap of his skull while his legs were still churning. 

The third birder, a thin, middle-aged woman with glasses and knobby knees in safari shorts, was too terrified to run. She emitted a keening noise like nails pulled out of boards and fell backward in a dead faint, unhit by the five shots ringing out from the big revolver.

“Curtis, wait! No! Stop!”

The antic farce became a medieval tableau mutated into a Bosch depiction of Pandemonium; no one moved: Curtis held his weapon rigid in the Weaver stance; Mario and Charles remained frozen, bent over Pablo administering the first dosage of the water mix through his mouth opened by the dental gag. Evgeni in his horror clown mask held his own mouth open in a pear-shaped, silent O. The camera rolled on.

Mario was the first to unfreeze. He raced to the truck, hopped into the driver’s seat, and started the engine, gears the grinding in his panic to escape.

Curtis rotated the gun one-hundred-eighty degrees in a robotic swing of his gun arm and fired at him: Snick, snick. Dry fire. The drum empty of rounds.

Evgeni dropped the tripod he was carrying down to the waterline and scooped up his machete. He ran after the truck and disappeared into the flattened grass track made by the truck.

Curtis flipped off his mask and headed for the woman. He reversed the gun in his hand converting it into a club. He hit her in the forehead splitting the meat open to the frontal skull plate. Before he could raise the gun to beat her brains out of her head, Charles intercepted him, driven by whatever impulse worked in his own feverish brain. He plunged his knife into Curtis’ neck. The severed carotid was a brilliant, spouting red geyser spraying green jungle. Charles’ crazed sawing motion left the shocked killer unable to strike back. In minutes, he was  exsanguinated. His hands locked fingers with Charles. Two deranged dancers. Curtis died on his knees cursing the man who nearly decapitated him.

Franco’s camera swung on its axis and caught the deadly pas de dieux. Like a signal going out on a different bandwidth, one by one, Franco’s audience caught up with the short time delay to hear and finally comprehend what was happening. Franco heard his name called from dozens of screens simultaneously, all demanding an explanation. 

Half-numbed  by events, Franco picked up the Sony, did a slow arc to reveal the landscape of bodies and zoomed on Charles glistening face and bulging eyes. Evgeni returned, gasping, his machete dangling from his hand.

“Ischez. Gone,” he blurted, bent over from exertion. “No truck.”

His audience’s screens went dark, blinking out like fireflies one after the other as each realized what had happened and logged off in a frenzy to avoid leaving any electronic footprints to the disaster behind. Franco’s dream of a golden retirement had collapsed around his ears. 

“Evgeni, Charles,” Franco commanded. “Throw everything into the water. Now!”

The men gathered up tents, equipment, the cases of water and honey, and took them down to the water’s edge and threw everything in. The stagnant water plopped with the sounds of thousands of dollars of equipment going into it.  

“Not the water, you moron!” Franco screamed, watching Evgeni about to swing their only case of the water. “Charles, push the boats into the water.”

“What about him?”

“Never mind him.”

Charles lifted the top boat off Pablo and shoved it in the water.

Evgeni, in water up to his knees, was about to retrieve a floating plastic bottle of water when the  caiman abandoned her nest and slid on her belly into the brackish water. Bigger and more aggressive than the male, she hurled her body at the invader and clamped Evgeni behind the knee, pulling him into the water. He half-rose, fell backward. She twisted his leg breaking the tibia in her powerful jaw. Using her tail for leverage, she dragged him screaming into deeper water.

“Charles, help him!”

“Not me, man!”

Charles was hunched over Curtis but mesmerized by the horror going on in the swamp. He turned his head to watch Evgeni’s struggle. Going over to Pablo, he didn’t see Pablo’s hand close over a framing nail with a wide, thick head dropped in the boat. He said a silent prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe. With the head centered in his palm, he thrust upward and backward as soon as Charles leaned over him to shove the boat into the mangrove. The point went into through Charles’ eyeball but stopped short of penetrating his brain.  

It was all going to hell so fast—

Charles fell atop Pablo, blood pouring into the prone man’s opened mouth. Franco made an immediate decision:  assisting a wounded man, half-blind man through the jungle meant tying a boat anchor to his need to get out of the area as fast as possible. Languishing for years in a filthy prison in San José was not an option. He spotted Evgeni’s machete by the water.  

“Charles, hang on, I’ll get first-aid kit.”

Like everything else, the first-aid kit was gone in the truck. Fetching the machete, he stepped behind the rocking, weeping Charles. He brought it down on Charles’ head cleaving scalp to the coronal suture where it stuck fast in bone. Charles’s arms flailed, then they flopped to his sides, and he seemed to fold in on himself like a jumper’s neck folding into the sidewalk. Blood burbled from his dead lips and a drool of bloody sputum flowed from his mouth like sticky taffy.

Franco barely heard the whispered plea from the supine Pablo: “Ayudame, por favor.”  

He looked from Pablo to the roiling water to see it finally close over Evgeni’s astonished face. He blew out his last breath before submerging before she took him under to be drowned where she’d haul him under the surface to find a fallen log to pin him under to rot. She would return weeks later to consume the soft flesh and some bones. Her excreta would leave nothing recognizable in the swamp muck other than Evgeni’s watch, a gift from his father on his sixteenth birthday.

Ayudame, ayudame, ayudame . . . por . . . favor.

Franco stood over the man with his machete and contemplated his options. Lethargy, shock, horror mixed in his psyche. He lifted the machete and lowered it at once. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. With no witnesses, and Pablo’s condition, Franco was confident he’d be the only one walking out of the jungle.

Rolling Charles into the water took seconds. Pushing Pablo’s boat into the water took a little longer. The boat slowly drifted toward the spot where Evgeni’s head went under.  

“Every man for himself, hombre,” he mumbled.

Franco dragged the two mutilated birders and their female companion by their heels. He sailed their boonies in after them and watched the tiny ripples spreading outward. 

Two bottles of water drifted toward him. He put one in each pocket, picked up the machete, and headed in the direction the truck had taken a lifetime ago.

* * *

By nightfall, Franco believed he had gone at least five miles. He reckoned he had another five to go to hit the major asphalt highway, and from there he could flag down a car or semi and tell the driver his story of being lost while cataloguing insects for a sabbatical project. His clothing had been wet with his perspiration for so long that he wasn’t aware he had stopped sweating. He was saving one bottled water for the tomorrow’s hike. The trouble was, the damned jungle was a green wall that extended the same in all directions. He climbed a short tree to get his bearings, but that didn’t work because the harsh light slanted off leaves and splintered into his eyes, confusing him as to directions. He would have to wait for the sun to descend. With all his electronics, he never thought of bringing along a compass.

Night fell fast in the jungle. One second, he was trudging through fern or cane, slashing away with his machete, the next he was wading through swamp muck that threatened to suck his boots off his feet. His belly growled from hunger. The truck held a two-week’s supply of canned goods and an ice locker of fresh meat, including some nonperishable delicacies from shops on Mercado Central.

While he walked, he thought of ways to recoup his losses. A giant Wheel for crushing organs and breaking bones. That’ll get the estrus flowing in his stoic lady from Brussels. Another Pablos stood about on every street corner . . . 

By sunset the next day, he was in trouble. He’d surely traveled more than the five miles that should have brought him to the big highway. The truck’s tracks were so wide that a child could have followed them. He didn’t recall seeing a second pair of tracks, narrower, when he scouted the region or when they set up camp. He did not remember certain features of the landscape. The tracks that split off were made by government surveyors and wound into the higher terrain where they ended at the same government highway twenty miles farther on. 

The fat professor, convinced he’d been scammed with the rest on Franco’s subscription list, sent an anonymous but convincingly detailed note to Manhattan authorities, who promptly contacted Interpol, albeit some details were embellished or invented. He wasn’t quite sure what exactly he had witnessed from his laptop in his office. Interpol subsequently relayed the information to Costa Rica’s Fuerza Pública. 

A search party was sent out two weeks later at the approximate locale indicated from the anonymous source’s note. The searchers did come upon the remote area in the lagoon but found nothing amiss. Nature had restored everything to its pristine order. Had Franco’s camera remained operating, it would have witnessed the subtle savagery of sex, eating, and death that restored the lagoon to its equilibrium before Franco’s truck disturbed the peace. 

Three months more passed before botanists from the National University found Franco’s skeletal remains leaning against a Kapok tree, one of the tallest in the rainforest. Its cottony seeds attract fauna, especially monkeys. He was in advanced decomposition by then, one leg missing, the corpse a mass of scratches and bites. Sepsis had played a part as well as dehydration and third-degree sunburn. His fingers were consumed down to the second knuckle by bullet ants covering the jungle floor. A golden silk orb weaver, very poisonous, had linked her web to an earhole from which her babies would come clambering out into the world. The late afternoon sun made it shimmer like spun gold.

One of the researchers shooed away a Brazilian Wandering Spider with a stick, one of the deadliest and most aggressive spiders on the planet. Rearing up for further height from its seven-inch leg span, it prepared to attack and was known to kill even small dogs. A female, too, she had lain her eggs behind Franco’s empty eye sockets, the fibrous tunic and inner layers composing the soft vascular material long since eaten away by the myriad flying insects rising and falling like a ragged curtain over the ruined head. Every time someone tried to disperse them, they flew up and descended back over his head like a ragged veil. The group speculated a jaguar must have removed the leg and carried it off. One member inferred from the ridge of crusted blood on the torn pants near the groin that he—they were sure it was a man—had been alive during the attack. 

Maggot worms had filled the interior cavity from his thorax to his lower abdomen; generations had nestled and writhed in that nursery. 

Most perplexing to the onlookers, however, was the fact that the highway was a mere fifty meters from where he had taken his final position against the tree, so lovely in the falling daylight with its delicate white flowers. 

Mario and the truck were never seen again. Pablo recovered, stayed in Costa Rica but worked his way steadily north. When he showed up in Matamoros eighteen months later, no one recognized him as the man who had been abducted by narcotraffickers. He left town in the morning for el norte.

Matriculation

Sadie glanced up at the clock over the hearth and checked her appearance: her tight jeans and her halter top, which  fitted her like a second skin. She inhaled her own scent, decided it was just right. Suddenly there was a rap on the apartment door. The clock chimed 8pm. Good, she thought, right on time. Pulling open the door, she greeted her lover with a pink-lipped smile and a sultry, “Hello there!”

At 10pm, Stan unlocked the door and entered the apartment. There he found Sadie, freshly showered and waiting expectantly for his return. “How’s it going, Sade?” he asked with obvious affection.

She smiled welcomingly and walked up to enfold him in a warm embrace. “It’s fine, now, baby,” she murmured as she kissed him with passion.

“What are you plans for tomorrow night?” Stan asked his wife.

“I’ve got to work on my thesis again, Stan, until about eleven this time,” replied Sadie.

Stan frowned slightly. “Then I’ll have an hour to kill before I come home,” he observed. 

“Why don’t you take in a late movie, sweetheart?” said Sadie. “The time,” she promised, “will just breeze by.”

Stan smiled. “I’ll do that,” he decided. The next afternoon, at two p.m., Stan, after making tender love with his wife of three years, embarked for his job at a Knoxville Walmart, where he worked as an assistant manager.

 At 10 p.m. that evening, Sadie sat at her computer desk, working on her PC. She wore a business suit, but was nude from the waist down. Her breathing came in rapid bursts and a thin trickle of perspiration streamed down her throat and onto her starched white shirt.

“How’s it comng?” he asked.

“Is that a pun?” she asked breathlessly.

He only chuckled.

Stan sat across the table from Sadie in the breakfast nook. She was pecking away on her iPad. He asked, “So how long till graduation, baby?”

She didn’t bother to look up. “17 days,” she replied, tap-tap-tapping on the virtual keyboard.

“It’s taken a while,” he commented.

“MBAs don’t grow on trees, Stan. You have to work for them.”

He nodded. “I know.” After a few minutes of companionable silence, he asked, “Have you seen your faculty advisor lately; is everything on track?”

She looked up. “I saw him last night. Everything’s on schedule. I graduate at the end of the semester, provided I complete my thesis.” At Stan’s unspoken question, she said, “And he’s still helping me with it.” Stan nodded.

Sadie lay upon her king-sized bed, her wrists bound to the bedposts, and squirmed furiously.

“Don’t come yet, honey,” purred the man with the really big cock. “I’m going to fuck you all night.”

“You…you can’t,” she said breathlessly. “My husband will be home by eleven.”

The man grabbed one of Sadie’s ass checks and squeezed evocatively. “I got news for you honey; it’s quarter past already.” He chuckled, the way he always did.

Sadie regained her equanimity and told him, “Get off me; I can’t have Stan walk in on us!”

“What do I care what the cuckold walks in on?” asked the man, who was pumping away rhythmically in and out of Sadie’s vagina.

“Because, he’ll kill you!” she told him sharply. “Stan’s twice your size!”

The man immediately stopped, pulled out of Sadie and ejaculated on her midriff. Hurriedly he began getting dressed.

“Untie me!” implored Sadie, struggling against her bonds. He only smiled his oily smile and exited the bedroom, leaving her bound and the door open. Sadie heard the door open and slam shut. “Shit!” she said helplessly.

Two days later found Sadie before her faculty advisor’s administrative assistant. The MBA student had received her summons by email. Ms. Kohler, who had worked for Dr. Stern for decades, smiled up at the striking young woman. Just the way that Justin liked them, she thought with a sad shake of her head.

“I hope I’m not late,” apologized Sadie, peering over the venerable Ms. Kohler’s desk.

“No, dear, you’re on time,” said Kohler with a soft smile. “But you know what they say?” Sadie cocked her head in a quizzical manner. “It may be later than you think,” remarked the white haired woman.

Sadie frowned thoughtfully, but offered no reply. “I could come back later, Ms. Kohler, if it’s inconven…”

“No,” the older woman said. “I’ll tell Dr. Stern you’re here. Go on back.”

Sadie travelled down the corridor, past the rabbit’s warren of faculty offices, coming at last to a thin, hollow wooden door with a small sign emblazoned with: “Prof. J. Stern, MBA Advisor.” She knocked.

“Come in!” snapped a harsh voice.

Sadie passed through the portal. “You wanted to see me, Dr. Stern?” she said.

Stern looked up with a neutral gaze and said, “Yes, come in, Miss Devereaux.” Sadie took a seat. “I want to discuss your final project,” he began.

“My thesis?” she asked. What was this all about? she wondered. She’d already received approval from the committee the week before. All that remained was for her faculty advisor to sign off on it.

“I’m afraid that your thesis, if we dare it that, is not acceptable.” Sadie’s mouth fell open. “It’s totally inadequate per the parameters of the department,” he elaborated. “I’m afraid you’ll have to start over; develop a new thesis, conduct new research, and write it over. I will, of course, be there with you all the way.” He chuckled darkly.

“I…don’t understand,” she said, but she felt she was beginning to. Stern had a good thing going, and he intended to hold onto it. He was a horny old bastard, she thought crossly.

“Nothing to understand,” he said shortly. “Start over, do it again.” He stood, thereby ending the conversation and dismissing her. “And next time,” he said icily, “don’t threaten me with your Neanderthal of a husband.” Sadie automatically bristled defensively. “I’ve easily got 50 I.Q. points on that sonofabitch. And don’t you forget it!” Sadie stared at him. “Let yourself out,” he said, and sat back down. “Oh,” Stern addressed her retreating back, “I’ll see you on Wednesday, as usual.” Sadie continued walking.

“What,” cried Stan the next Wednesday, as they sat for lunch in the breakfast nook, “you have to work again tonight? I thought your Wednesday nights were over with. What gives?” he asked unhappily.

“This is the last time, I promise,” replied Sadie, crossing her heart with her fingers. “We have to go over the final chapter of the thesis. Then it’s over,” she promised.

Grumpily, Stan accepted her explanation. After all, Sadie had never lied to him before. “Gotta get to work, babe,” he said, rising to his feet. ” ‘Ol Sam Walton won’t take any excuses.” He smiled at his wife and soon departed with a twinkle in his eye. He thought, not for the first time, how lucky he was to be married to such a sweet girl.

Eight o’clock that evening found Sadie back in her bedroom with the indefatiguable Dr. Stern, who appeared to have overmedicated on Viagra. He had Sadie face down on the mattress and was enthusiastically thrusting his large cock into her vagina, from the rear position this time. “Sadie,” he muttered pointedly, “I wanna be your back door man,” and he cackled like he always did when he thought he’d been clever. At length, he finished his business and thrust his first two fingers up her butt. She jumped, full of revulsion. Again he laughed hoarsely. “Don’t bother to get up,” he told her mockingly, “I’ll see my own way out.” And he was gone.

Finally, Sadie arose from the scene of the crime and gathered her robe about her. She glanced at her cell phone: 9:30. She would have time to shower and rinse the filth from her body before Stan got home, but she’d have to hurry. Padding across the bedroom, she opened a dresser drawer and fussed for a moment with the micro-camera that had been humming away. She flipped it off. She briefly tested the audio component. Stern’s ragged cackle emanated from the tiny speaker. There could be no mistaking the faculty advisor’s ugly laugh. Tomorrow, she would have another meeting with the professor. She held the small tape in her hand and glared determinedly into her dresser mirror.

Six weeks later, Sadie opened a manila envelope affixed with the university’s return address. Making something of a ritual of opening the letter–she had foregone the traditional graduation ceremony at the college– and extracted her diploma and displayed it proudly for her husband. He congratulated her wholeheartedly on her accomplishment. “Look, babe, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but getting a degree is one thing; finding just the right job is something else again. Know what I mean?” he asked.

“I thought of that too,” she told him, “but hard work is the way you get anything. Just like with the MBA–I’ve got a plan.”

Buried Swords

Bethany shuddered. She knew some of these men. How was she supposed to respond if she encountered them at the grocery store or Wal-Mart after this?

“Hey, hey, Lady!” Another came in punching a fistful of crumpled bills at her. When she took them she found they were unaccountably wet. The man pulled his mask off and threw it over the counter. She had to duck to avoid it. 

More and more men showed up. They just kept coming. The gray security box she’d brought was overflowing with cash. She’d never seen the library this crowded before. There were people everywhere but no one was reading. 

“Is this…the place from the ad?” Another had approached the counter. Crestfallen, Bethany nodded and took his fifty dollars. The man first removed his mask, then his long overcoat. He was completely nude underneath. He ran in to join the others. 

Bethany had never heard such sounds before. It sounded like fifty mothers furiously scrubbing their hands with dish soap or maybe an army of bored children squeezing their palms down in their armpits to create suction and the flatulent sound that goes with it. But these weren’t mothers and they weren’t children. They were all gross and hairy men. 

There was no way to open the windows after hours but the odor had become overpowering. The funk of an uncountable number of men, naked and fucking each other, spread across the two stories of the library. 

She’d never seen anything like this before, never wanted to. A pudgy man wearing only a black vest, nothing else, had allowed himself to be strung up in the air, face-up, his knees tied to his elbows. He was bald on top but had wiry silver hair sprouting out of the sides, like some aged clown. He was being violently thrust into the crotch of another man, while yet one more pushed him by the shoulders to add force. It sounded like they were killing him. It looked like he might die. But Bethany stayed away. She’d made this horrible bargain and was now bound by its precepts. 

“Don’t interfere.” Gilbert had commanded. He was the one who’d set this all up.

“Yes sir.” She’d said. Since Covid things had been bad. Her husband had lost his job. Every other day the city was threatening to lay her off. Someone had overheard the mayor asking what was the point of paying librarians to work from home because it wasn’t like they could stack book shelves from home. Six years of college for a master’s in library studies and everyone still thought her job entirely consisted of stacking books all day. 

“Look, these folks know and accept their risks. Despite what you may see, do not ever interfere. Do you understand?” 

“I understand.” She’d said the words but really had no idea what it all meant. The way Gilbert had been explaining it, these were just people who wanted to be around others. They needed a place where they could gather and not have someone bothering them about masks and social distancing. 

“We just want a little normalcy.” He’d said and it seemed like an okay deal at the time. She’d keep the library open after hours and for fifty bucks a head these people could use the facility. 

People. He’d used the word “people” but these were all men. Throughout the night only one woman showed up. She was a gussied-up blonde whose mink coat and sheer party dress must have cost a lot of money to make her look so cheap. 

She was drunk and stumbled in seemingly unable to walk in her own high heels without draping herself over the little guy with the thinning shoulder length hair who held her up. They were both giggling and laughing. She had one of those high-pitched chortles that one’s never supposed to hear in a library. 

At first the couple made their way to Bethany. As they got closer, near enough to see the “party” going on inside, the woman stopped in her tracks and gasped.

“C’mon baby, this is what we talked about.” He cajoled.

“I’m not….I’m not going in there.” The woman held her hand up to her mouth and her many diamond rings and silver bracelets shown in the light. 

“We came all this way!” The guy had all the charm of an impatient boss. Bethany was only three feet away but she didn’t even pretend not to be watching the fight go down. Anything was preferable to the horror show behind her.

“No!” The blonde wanted no part of what she saw in there. Kinky coked up key parties were one thing. Maybe even the occasional Anything-Goes-Party-Bus but this couple had just peered into the abyss of male sexuality run completely amok and she didn’t like it one bit. The woman turned and hobbled away like a damsel in distress as her knight in Drakkar Noir and artificial tanner chased out after her. 

It sounded as if the building was filled with ghosts and MMA fighters. Bethany could hear nothing but a symphony of moans amidst the ubiquitous slap of skin hitting skin at high velocity. 

No one considers themself a prude, Bethany no exception. She’d read Fifty Shades of Gray with one hand. Her husband liked to tease her whenever she brought home a romance novel with a hunk on the cover. As an avid book lover she prided herself on the fact that she’d even read a gay romance novel or two. But nothing had prepared her for this. First off there was no romance, at all. The only kissing she witnessed seemed violent acts of aggression. There was no tenderness, not even smiles. At best, the men performed their acts like disinterested masseuses and at worst, they seemed hateful. It was as if the other man’s body had done them a great dishonor and they were now exacting revenge. 

A dead bird being picked at by insects. A fat person dancing. A dog with his face caught in a jar. These are things you just can’t look away from.  Well it turned out, so was a library full of middle-aged men lubricated in oils and one another’s juices, congealing their bodies together in arrays that seemed to defy the understood limits of human anatomy. 

The intensity and extremity only increased as the night wore on, accelerated by a series of unspoken dares. You could have told her that these men were possessed by devils or under the influence of alien mind rays or even an elaborate hallucination brought on by stress and Bethany would have eaten it up. She’d have loved an excuse, any excuse, other than the horrible truth that was so vividly being displayed before her. These were just men. Behind every smile, every suit and tie, everyone’s grandpa, their fathers, all men, were just like this on the inside or if given the opportunity. Willing to turn it all over, to let themselves digress into heedless, wanton lust.

Bethany wept until she had no tears left. Her water bottle had gone missing and she did not want it back. She felt robbed of her energy and her smile too. Her body sat there numb and empty while the minutes on the clock mercifully ticked down to two o’clock. The deal was that everyone would go home at two. 

There were no complaints, like when a bar closes. There was no talking. Just a crescendo of moans topped off with each man apparently doing an impression of the sound he’d make if murdered.  

Then they shuffled out, putting back on their clothes and masks. The businessmen went back to being businessmen. The homeless piled on their rags and left. Nobody looked anyone else in the eye, especially not Bethany. 

None of this had gone how she’d expected. She looked out over the library and gasped at the mess the men had left behind. 

“Hey, don’t worry, most of that will dry off by morning.” Gilbert was the last one out. He was fastening the buttons on his shirt. 

Bethany looked down at the floor, unable to reply. 

“I can tell you’re a little shell shocked. But you gotta understand…”

She looked up at him.

“This is the fucking apocalypse.” He put on his face mask. “It’s not like we expected. No fiery comets and no angels with trumpets but this is it. Maybe it’ll take five years, maybe even fifty but we’ve all felt it. We’ve lost something and we’re not ever getting it back. 

“Locked inside. We’re cut off from our friends, our family, our coworkers. That cute new thing at the office who you’re now never going to get to know any better. The friend you’ve been meaning to get around to visiting, you won’t. You’re not going to bump heads with your soul mate reaching for the same book at a bookstore. That gravy train of human progress has derailed. It’s all downhill from here.”

“How does any of that explain…this?!” 

“They took sports. We’re not supposed to play basketball or wrestle. We can’t watch a game and cheer together. Just like a woman needs affection and emotional support, men need to feel one another. Competing with him, fight him, fuck him. Bury your sword in him, figuratively. Half those guys aren’t even gay. We just need to taste his sweat and press our bodies against his. We need to breath heavy, work together or maybe against one another.  Women need affection, men need this. People need food, water and some sort of physical reassurance from another human being to know that we still exist.” 

Bethany hadn’t thought she could get any more depressed tonight. 

“So are we set for Tuesday night too?” 

Bethany wanted to throw up. Then she looked down at the gray box that sprung open like a jack-in-the-box made of cash whenever she opened it. She looked at what she could see of Gilbert’s face behind his face mask and then out to the mess in her library. The defenseless books so fouled that she’d have to pick them up with a grabber and drop them into the incinerator. She didn’t know if Gilbert was right, if this was in fact the apocalypse. The emotional roller coaster she’d just taken for the last four hours, the sights she’d seen, had left her without the energy to care one way or the other. 

“Fuckit.” She consented. “Just next time, if they want to use books for their little props, they need to bring their own from home!”

“Yes ma’am.” Gilbert gave mock salute and escaped back into the night. Bethany affixed her own mask, turned out the lights and said goodbye to all the lonely books. Her husband was still awake when she got home. He had nowhere to be in the morning. They cuddled up together and watched some TV. Happy to have one another in the face of a possibly ending world.

George and the Winged Woman

What’s to be done? It’s all gas fumes and highway. George Sudsby looked at the tip of his pinky finger as he drove. It was melting, leaking a purple liquid down what remained of his finger. This was not a good sign. His father and grandfather had both melted away like this, disintegrated into a puddle of purple liquid. Now George was dissolving, and he was only thirty-three years old. His father was in his fifties when this happened to him. So was his grandfather. But you never knew about these things.

He thought he had time. He was in love. Didn’t that count for anything? When he died, a little bit of passion would be gone from the world, too. He had Celeste, a winged woman. She wasn’t always there, disappearing and living her mysterious other lives for weeks, even a month at a time. She didn’t belong to him. She didn’t belong to anyone. But she always came back to him, and George always welcomed her. 

There was no physical pain, so that was something at least. 

The thick purple liquid foamed as it ran down his pinky finger. George gave the car as much gas as it could take. Maybe he could outrun his own destruction. 

Ring ‘em up. Ring ‘em all up. The woman whose groceries he was scanning smiled and said, “I have a coupon for that.” A coupon? Of course she had a coupon. George’s pinky finger had fully dissolved down to the knuckle. He had a bandage over it, but how long could the illusion hold? It didn’t hurt, and George wondered if the process would be completely without pain. He recalled that his father seemed to take it all in stride. He even made jokes about the situation.

The woman whose groceries he was ringing up smiled at him and said, “I have a coupon for that.” A coupon? Of course she had a coupon. George wanted to jump up on the conveyor belt, kick off all the groceries, tear his Walbeens shirt off and say, “Your coupons are only good in Hell!” Instead, he only nodded, and looked at his missing finger. He hoped he didn’t dissolve too much at work. He didn’t want to have to bother with cleaning up his own spill. And he knew they wouldn’t let him go home. Not as long as he could still ring up groceries. And he would have to lose both arms and at least one leg for that to happen. 

He wondered if he was in the winged woman’s thoughts at all. 

The whiskey in the soda can underneath the register felt so good every time he took a nice swig. Fuck it, and so what if he was caught? He would be dead soon, anyway. That had to count for something. 

Fully drunk when he stumbled and bumbled off work that night, swaying from one side to another, George found himself in the alley by his apartment building. His right hand had only started melting a little, so it was possible to hold his dick steady as he took a long and satisfying piss. What a fucking relief it was. Could he have made it to his apartment? Possibly, but he mostly just wanted to feel like he was pissing on the planet itself. The guts of it.

A voice from behind: “Spare a coin or two?”

George shook and replaced. He turned around and standing pretty close to his face was a very disheveled man. His eyes were yellow and his pupils were vertical slits, like a cat. George dug through his pockets and came up with a couple of coins. He put them in the man’s hand.

“Say,” the man said, “do you know the winged woman?”

A sudden surge of jealousy. But, no, she would never associate with a man like that. And yet…

“What do you know about her?” George said, a little more aggressively than he’d intended. 

“I sometimes see her at that window.” He pointed at a tenth story window in a building across the street. His building. Relief. It was George’s own apartment. 

“I know her,” George said.

“Quite a spectacle,” the man said. 

In his apartment, George turned on the lights and sat on the recliner. He turned on the TV. The rebels had taken over Tulip Zone. It bordered Tranquility Zone II, which was where George lived. He wondered if they’d make their way over and try to liberate his zone. The rebels were militantly pro labor union, and George figured that might make things easier for him at Walbeens. 

If he made it that long. There was purple all over his pants. The rest of his right hand was melting away, and rapidly. Okay, not much time now. At least it didn’t hurt. But George was still terrified. What would death be like? Would it just be a turning off and then nothingness? Or was there something beyond?

The hand was gone now, melted away. 

A gentle tap at his window. It was Lucy, the winged woman. She hovered, smiling at him. He waved her in with his good hand. She opened the window and flew in. 

“I’m not doing so good,” George said. 

She let her wings rest on her back and walked over to him. She stood in front of him and started to cry.

“How long?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” George said. “But it doesn’t hurt. It should hurt, right?”

“I’m glad it doesn’t hurt,” she said. 

Now both hands had melted to the wrists. 

“I don’t think I have long now,” George said. “I’m scared. I’m really scared. I don’t know what’s next.”

She squatted down and ran her finger over his forehead. “Peace is next,” she said. 

“It was always hard sharing you with other people,” George said. “With the world. I was always happy for your success, but jealous.”

“What can I do for you?” she said.

“One more flight. Please.”

She stood up and scooped him up into her arms. She cradled him like a baby as both of his arms started to melt away. It was happening fast now. 

Out the window and into the air. He couldn’t really see anything because there was purple in his eyes. Everything was melting now. 

The last thing he heard was the winged woman’s piercing wail, the saddest cry of mourning that he’d ever heard. My god, he was going to miss her.