Sloughing Off the Rot (9 page)

John tossed and turned during the night, his skin prickly and uncomfortable from the swollen munkle bites that were forming into pus-filled carbuncles and furuncles all over his body. The conversation with Santiago echoed in his head. He felt nothing about his situation. The burning bush told him to walk, so he walked. Santiago led him into temptation – food, lunkworms, physical altercations – that he cared nothing about otherwise. Crazy Talk saved his life while he was sleeping, but John would have been just fine with being murdered in his sleep by the worm-addled lunkies.

As he drifted in and out of his fitful sleep, John saw the face of Android Lovethorn. The Reverend Lovethorn’s head, laughing and ringed in a halo of red flames, floated as a hypnogogic apparition before John. “Thrive and drool on,” said the apparition. “I will thrive and drool on.” And strings of foamy slobber oozed from the corners of his mouth. The flaming black-haired head doubled in size and thrust itself in John’s direction. Lovethorn ripped off his mirrored sunglasses and empty black eye sockets stared at John. And the void in the sockets reflected John’s emptiness and blackness right back at him. And John flinched, found himself falling backwards, flailing his arms and legs at the hazy space between sleep and alertness, then jerking back awake and realizing it was just a dream.

Then the cycle started again with the discomfort and agitation and stinging of the munkle fly bites. He felt the boils on his flesh bursting and seeping out the pus. But, he did not care. And the seepage drained him not only of fluids, but also of his energy. And with the flowing river of fire above and Wormwood casting down its green aura, he drifted back toward sleep, only to be accosted again by Lovethorn’s horrid, laughing countenance. Then the falling. And the jerking back awake. And the discomfort. And so it went through the night for John.

On the ground around John, the others lapsed in and out of sleep and were also visited by Lovethorn’s empty eye sockets and his mocking laughter. They all squirmed restlessly and fought and fit with sleep. Like John, the men all found sleep elusive until just before sunrise, when exhaustion finally won out and the men achieved the empty, dreamless slumber.

Santiago shook John awake. The smell of cooked dirt-rat filled the air. Crazy Talk and Two-Dogs-Fucking still lay on the ground, each on one side of Alf the Sacred Burro and cuddling up to the sickly donkey. John’s stirring awakened Alf. The burro choked on a gob of mucous and coughed it out onto Two-Dogs-Fucking, waking the bulbous slackard. Crazy Talk did not move.

“Crazy Shit over there didn’t make you any breakfast, did he, now?” Santiago said, and he handed John a pointed stick with a fire-grilled dirt-rat impaled on it. His mossy smile sought John’s approval.

The fat rodent’s eyes bulged and remnants of singed hair stuck to its head and ears. Grease dripped from the rat’s face. The smell of the rat-kabob tickled John’s salivary glands and a borborygmus rumbled in his gut. He ingurgitated all edible parts of the animal before rising and relieving his morning wood with a drawn-out arc of urine.

Even after pissing a quart of fluid, John’s erection remained firm. He felt the tickle of arousal in his loins and found privacy behind a thick saguaro cactus. With a fervor that he had forgotten, John scratched his prurient itch, assailing his loins repeatedly. And the bloody slush at his feet once again spawned new and sundry creatures that crawled across the desert floor and evolved before John’s eyes. Several of the smaller jizz-critters scaled the towering cactus and perched on its arms, high above and staring down at John. Some of the creatures expired in the morning glare and others sprouted springy legs and fled across the landscape. John heard the excitement of Santiago and the others in the distance as they clubbed the beasts that invaded their camp. The men split and gutted the jizz-critters and fed on their meat for breakfast. John said nothing when he returned to find them cooking the creatures over the fire and eating them. Even if he thought to warn them, he had no idea what he would say.

With their bellies full and heads dopey from fitful sleep, they set out on the red brick road again, with a direction and intent toward Android Lovethorn. The roiling river of clouds flowed rapidly overhead in the same direction as the men. Bloodwood trees occasionally shot from the ground along the side of the trail, spreading their limbs in a welcome gesture to the sky above, their rough bark oozing sweet, rubious sap. And they came upon a bloodwood tree with a man dangling by the neck from a rope, his face pecked clean by scavengers but the rest of his body intact and mummified by the desert sun. The man wore clothes of fine white linen, just like John’s. His feet sported sandals identical to John’s. His hair, crusted with sap from the tree, approximated the same shade and length as John’s longish brown hair.

Crazy Talk stepped off of the path and peeled bark from the tree. He picked tiny pink grubs from the stripped bark and popped them in his mouth like a handful of pinyon nuts. Grabbing one of the dangling body’s feet, Crazy Talk set the corpse to swinging back and forth like a rotten-meat pendulum. “Word is, this the tenth specimen of similar linen-wrapped fruit that these trees have borne in so many moons,” said Crazy Talk, picking more grubs from the bark and eating them as the body swung behind him.

“Well, halloooo,” crooned Two-Dogs-Fucking as he ambled upon the group at the tree, waving his walking stick in greeting. For most of the morning he and Alf the Sacred Burro had trailed the others. They took their time plodding along, sometimes leaving the trail, cutting across the desert, and catching John as he came back around a bend of the red road. Two-Dogs-Fucking peeled a piece of bark from the bloodwood tree and started in on his own lunch of pink grubs. “I am not feeling like doing this today. I’d rather nap in the shade for a while. As for my donkey friend, this heat is really taking it out of him.”

Alf the Sacred Burro plopped his hindquarters on the ground beside John and horked up several stinking bezoars the size and shape of large grapes. Before the stench from the donkey lumps had time to find a good current to drift on, Santiago fell upon them, grabbing the hairy bezoars and shoving them into the bag around his neck. He shook the bag at Crazy Talk and taunted him with a smile. John reached down and patted Alf’s ribs, trying to knock out whatever else might be blocking up the donkey. Alf nudged his muzzle against John, who found himself scritching the donkey’s head without even thinking about it.

Santiago jumped high in the air and tried to grab at the dead man. “He’s holding something,” said Santiago, and he leapt again, grabbing at the mummified hand. With his third effort, Santiago sprang high and slapped at the hand, hitting it but failing to dislodge its contents.

“Here,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking, handing Santiago the crooked, knotted walking stick he had been using. “Take a whack at it with this.”

Santiago stared at the stick, not sure if he wanted to accept it. Two-Dogs-Fucking did not set Santiago on edge like Crazy Talk. But still, Santiago wasn’t sure that he wanted to accept help from any of Three Tooth’s men. “Go ahead,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking. “Take it. It’s yours to keep if you like.”

Santiago tentatively accepted the stick and found that he liked the way it felt in his hand. He gripped it and, like a kid attacking a piñata, swung it with all of his might at the mummified claw. And the stick smacked the hand, almost knocking it off of the arm at the wrist. With his next whack, Santiago knocked the hand clear off of the arm. It flew through the air and smacked down on the ground at Crazy Talk’s feet. Before Santiago could grab the cadaver-piñata prize, Crazy Talk was holding it and prying back the dehydrated fingers, each cracking and falling off as they were pried away. And from the crumbling claw, Crazy Talk plucked an oversized playing card, the ace of spades. And the artwork on the face of the card showed, in Day-Glo colors, a linen-clad, faceless body, hanging from a tree by a noose and gripping an ace of spades.

John took the card and carried it along with him. He, Santiago and Crazy Talk left the bloodwood tree behind them and set out on the red brick road again. Behind them, Two-Dogs-Fucking sat on the ground under the tree and continued to eat the grubs he dug out of the bark.

“I’m not really motivated to walk right now. I think I’ll take a little siesta, nosh a little, and catch up with you guys later,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking, waving the men away, unconcerned about being alone with just a sickly donkey in such active lunkhead territory.

El Camino de la Muerte twisted and curved and rose and dropped. The challenge of the road and the searing desert heat slowed the men to a crawl. Along the way they encountered more bloodwood trees with lynched bodies dangling from them. Santiago developed a knack for knocking the hands off of the bodies with his new walking stick. And Crazy Talk snapped the dry fingers away from the cards and handed them to John. The cards depicted various images rendered in shocking hues that cast a neon glow. The second card they collected was a joker, and the fool on the image resembled Santiago with his wild hair and beard and unibrow. And the crazed look in the joker’s eyes was not new to John, as he had seen that look on Santiago’s face many times. Another card showed a man with two heads and a scale behind him. One card depicted a corpulent man with a long goatee and the curved horns of a mountain goat. And the goat-man reclined on a throne with writhing bodies at his feet. The jack of diamonds had two faces on his head, both of the faces somewhat resembling Crazy Talk’s. And the faces looked out from opposite sides and spoke, their words forming a black cloud above the shared head. On the two of clubs was a giant with a boulder of a head and stout body. And the giant fought off a gang of men who attacked him and clung to his limbs. His thick head tilted back as he screamed out at his attackers. By the time they settled down under the light of Wormwood and the two quarter moons, John had nearly collected an entire deck of the glowing cards. And he fell asleep studying the images on the cards, trying to derive their meaning.

Sometime during the night, Two-Dogs-Fucking and Alf the Sacred Burro moseyed into John’s camp. Wormwood cast a luminous emerald glow over the desert. Two-Dogs-Fucking wandered away from the camp, and out of the protective circle of piss, to find the perfect spot to lay on his back and marvel at the beauty of the sky with its two moons and river of fire. Alf did not follow and instead elected to curl up beside John. Two-Dogs-Fucking lay back, his hands locked behind his head, and fell asleep to the shimmering streaks of a meteor shower.