Bullet Through Your Face (improved format) (16 page)

He’d been thinking along these lines for a while now anyway, hadn’t
he? The shovel bit into the soil. He didn’t need any more money,
which meant he didn’t need Gormok, either.

And there was one more thing he didn’t need:
Beth,
he thought, and grinned.
He’d gotten what he wanted
out of her. And another point: she was starting to look really beat
these days. Skinny, pale, dark circles
under her
eyes. I’m a high-roller now
, he congratulated himself.
Why’s a big time, big-buck guy like me need a little-tit stringbean
bitch like her
?

He could move his harem here! Shit, those girls made the
Playboy Mansion look like a dog pound. And there were some new
ones now too, like Beverly: California tan, waxed pubes, 40 doubleD’s and nipples sticking out like a pair of golf cleats.
Her tits should
hang in The National Gallery!
he reveled as he dug. And Melissa?
A
cosmetic-surgery paragon; she had a body on her that would put a
stiffer on the Pope! Then there was Alicyn, whose vaginal barrel was
more dextrous than an olympic gymnast.
Oooo-eeee!
he thought.
Not to mention Shelly and Kelly, two brick-shit house redhead
twins whose favorite bedroom game was “Sandwich.” Rudy never
hesitated to play the part of the cheese.

There were so many, an endless Whitman’s Sampler of sex!
Shit yeah! I’ll move them all here! The entire bimbo brigade!
I’ll build a fucking luxury apartment complex in the back yard!
He could picture it. A different chick every day, a mass orgy every
night! He’d eat Beluga caviar out of nut-tan bellybuttons, abdomens.
Slurp Perrier-Jouet from Tit Valleys.
Blondes on the half-shell,
baby! Redheads Au Gratin, and Brunettes Au Jus! I will live like a
Renaissance prince!
Yeah. And Gormok? And Beth? Rudy’s grin
darkened in the moonlight. He rested a moment. Then he began to
dig the second grave.

“You come out here with me,” he insisted. “I need you to hold the
flashlight.
^”
“All right,” Beth agreed. “And bring the gun.”
Even bereft of arms and legs, Gormok was not easy lugging up the
stairs.
The fucker weighs more than a pallet of bricks!
Rudy thought
between grunts. Then, as he lowered the torso into the wheelbarrow,
Rudy winced as if slapped. Gormok, apparently unable to control his renal system, urinated quite liberally into Rudy’s face.
Beth laughed.
“Dear Rudy, ho!” Gormok exclaimed. “My deepest apologies!

Such
incontinence, I assure you, is quite a contretemps!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Rudy forced himself to reply, dripping warmly.
“I guess a man’s gotta go when he’s gotta go.”
“And, goodly friend, hast lovely Beth enlightened thee? The wondrous
news that the harvest of my loins hast given her a belly large with
child?”
“Uh, yeah,” Rudy replied. His back strained as he trundled the
wheelbarrow along the pool deck. “That’s, uh, that’s why we’re going
out back, you know, to have a party, just the three of us.”
“Great Ea! My joy comes unbridled!” Gormok exclaimed, close
to tears. His stumps roved in glee. “A celebration!”
There’s gonna be a celebration, all right
, Rudy avowed as he grunted onward.
I’m gonna bury both of you whacks, and celebrate by pissing on your graves
.
The great back yard of the estate shimmered in quiet moonlight.
It was warm out tonight, and pretty--a great night for burying people.
Rudy pushed the laden wheelbarrow to the back of the property. He
hefted Gormok’s trunk and set it beside the first hole. The mound of
freshly turned soil blocked the second hole from Beth’s sight.
“But such a strange place for a celebration,” Gormok’s head
remarked, craning atop the torso.
Rudy took the gun from Beth, who stood aside with a smirk.
He checked the cylinder, saw that it was loaded, then snapped it shut with a flip of the wrist.
“Do it now,” Beth ordered.
Rudy smiled. “What I’m gonna do, you torso-fucking little slut, you Babylonian-cum-swallowing whore, is kill the both of you.”
Then he aimed the revolver at Beth’s stone-cold face.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been planning? Use your brain, Rudy.
Think!
Gormok’s an alomancer—he can
foresee
the future. If you think all we’ve
been doing down there is fucking, then you’re even dumber than I
thought.”

Rudy snapped the trigger a dozen times, each drop of the hammer resounding in a quick metallic
click!
“But this one will.”
Rudy peed his pants when Beth pointed another revolver in his face. “Now . . . kill Gormok,” she said.
“With what?”
“I don’t care. Just kill him.”
The gun barrel steadied on the point between Rudy’s eyes.
A moment later, he had his foot behind the shovel, the blade at Gormok’s throat.
“Have
no fear, dear Rudy,” the torso strangely commented. The silly face
smiled in moonlight. “Fate beckons us all, the joyfilled summons of
providence.”
Beth kept the gun on him as Rudy bore down. He stomped the back of the
shovel until the blade separated Gormok’s head from the armless
shoulders. Blood pumped from the stump, soaking Kentucky Blue sod. Rudy
kicked the head into the grave.
“And now you kill me,” he said, turning.
“Oh, no,” Beth replied. And before Rudy could turn completely, she brought the gun-butt down hard on his skull.

Rudy would’ve been wise to read some of the books he’d had Beth
get out of the library. Gormok had verified all she’d discovered. The
spirit of a condemned salt-diviner could never be killed, only the
body it happened to occupy at the time. The spirit merely moved on
to possess the body in closest proximity.

Later, Beth calmly buried Gormok’s head and torso. She also
buried Rudy’s arms and legs. Then she went downstairs, and to the
basement’s new tenant, she whispered, “Goodnight.”

“On the morrow, my sweet beauty!” Rudy’s head replied but
in the familiar high, nasal warble. “I bid thee the most heavenly
dreams!”

Now she could have all the babies she wanted. It wasn’t like
Rudy was going anywhere. And if she ever ran short of money . . .
There was always the ashtray, and the salt.

I