The Vile Village (11 page)

“Famous around the country, you say,” Vorstel said softly, staring at Stone. “Well, that’s mighty nice, mighty fucking nice,
indeed.” Stone’s flatteries, as he thought they would, melted the heart of even the toughest asshole in the place. All men
are suckers for adulation. And he who knows it can play with them like puppets.

“Come on, Preacher Boy,” Vorstel said suddenly, pushing some of his slow-moving men out of the way so that they fell backward,
sprawling on the floor. “You and me is going to have a few drinks and talk about killing.”

T
hey drank for hours. Vorstel sent over for bottle after bottle of the green and the brown stuff, and Stone had no choice but
to keep at it right alongside of the over-grown bastard and pray that they weren’t suckering him into a trap.

“What’s that on your face?” Vorstel asked him after the first few gulps had been chugged.

“Radiation bums,” Stone said, trying not to spit out the mouthful of the foul brew he had just imbibed. If the brown, which
he had had at the bar, had been fit for pigs, the green stuff was worse. It tasted like mouthwash in which mouths had, in
fact, been washed. Or perhaps horses’ hooves. Whatever it was, the liquid had a most unpleasant, long, lingering aftertaste.
Yet the whole damn place seemed to swear by the “liquor,” as bottle after bottle was consumed and the barkeep kept having
to send down to the basement for more. “Got caught in some high-rad rains,” Stone went on, feeling around his face.

“You think that’s something?” Vorstel laughed, pulling his tree-sized leg up on the table, which shook around under the weight.
“Got me
this
bum when I kneeled on a piece of metal just inside a nuke crater about fifty miles from here. I figured the radiation would
be dead, but—” He pulled up the cuff of his right pant leg and rolled it up to his knee. Stone winced. The entire leg from
just above the kneecap down to around mid-calf was bright purple and all scarred with cordlike knots that twisted around it
in all directions. It was not the sort of leg that would win many bathing-beauty contests.

“Damn thing sizzled my skin when I touched it,” the Struthers ganger went on, staring hard at Stone. “Next thing I knew, I
smelt my own flesh burning, and I jumped back, but it was already done. Damn thing swelled up to the size of a garbage can.
Couldn’t walk on it for nearly six months. But now it works just fine.”

“Well, that is a nice scar,” Stone said, having taken his fifth big gulp of the green stuff, which he was discovering, to
his pleasure—and horror—seemed to taste better with each sip. “But for something long and just plain nasty-looking, check
this out.” Stone pulled upon his fatigue jacket and lifted the black sweatshirt he wore beneath it. There was a long, narrow
scar that ran from his belly button up the whole side of his chest.

“Goddamn cannibal gave me that with an ax. Can you believe it”—Stone snorted—“before I made him worm chow.” Vorstel bent over
and examined the reddish scar as if a doctor.

“Nice, nice, I won’t say it ain’t nice,” the gang leader said, sitting back with a look of determination on his three-toothed
face, his wisps of black hair combed over the top of his scalp like a few hurredly drawn pencil lines. “But
this
is a
real
scar.” He lifted his thick black fur coat back and pulled his own thick zippered shirt back, ripping the zipper right from
the material as he did so.

“Knife wound. Three guys attacked me. Then I attacked them.” The blade had nearly penetrated the ganger’s stomach, for there
was a huge mass of tangled scar tissue that curved across the whole width of his stomach. It was almost the kind of cut one
would make to commit hara-kari—the Oriental art of self-disembowelment.

“Oh, yeah,
this
was a good one, I’ll tell you,” Vorstel said with a wide smile. “I had to hold my own guts in while they ran and got a horse
doctor who sewed the damn thing up with fishing line. But it held, didn’t it?” He punched himself hard three times in the
stomach where the scar tissue was thickest, then laughed loudly, screaming for more brew as he tossed a bottle back up over
his head, not even giving a damn where it landed. In fact, it landed on the head of a trapper who had come down from the mountains
looking for some fun. The trapper thought the bloke next to him had tossed the bottle, and so the trapper turned and cut the
man’s ear off with a single slice, which started quite a stir at that end of the bar, to which Stone and his drinking partner
paid not the slightest heed.

“Well, you may have me at in the ‘longest’ department, but I know I got the strangest,” Stone bragged as some of the green
drink sprayed from the corner of his lips so that it looked like he had just taken a mouthful of green paint. Stone was getting
drunker by the minute and starting to lose it. But somewhere in the back of his mind he always knew where his “equalizers”
were and just how long it would take him to reach them.

“Here,” Stone said, lifting the back of his shirt and exposing part of his lower back. “See those five dark dots? Electrodes
from an electric stun gun made them. Hurt like a motherfucker, with twenty thousand volts coming in through the goddamn skin.”

“Now that’s nice, that’s real nice,” Vorstel said with the slightly awed tone of the true connoisseur of such bodily scars.
“But still I got me a weird one myself.” He lifted up the pant leg on his left side and showed his own multipronged pierce
mark, this one three quarter-sized wounds side by side in a straight line across the huge leg. “Pitchfork. Just lying there
on the ground about five years ago. Didn’t see it. Walked right into the damn thing, speared myself like a fucking fish. Went
right through, it did. Got the same holes coming out the back too.”

And so it went, as the two showed their battle scars to one another, exchanged war stories of just who they’d killed and where
they’d gotten him, demonstrating it all dramatically using their hands as knives or pistols. The two “killers” got along famously,
going at it until they were both so drunk that even Vorstel, who had been known to drink a cow under the table, couldn’t stand
up. He had some of his boys help him and Stone, and they were half carried the two blocks to one of the Strathers brothers’
whorehouses, the best in Cotopaxi.

Stone kept trying to keep his eyes open to make sure they weren’t taking him out back to shoot him or to just throw him down
a well. In his condition he wouldn’t have been able to put up much resistance. But they weren’t out to get him, at least not
tonight. For suddenly he was being helped into a well-lit bordello with chandeliers and purple carpets and curtains all over
the place. He could hardly see what it was he was looking at beyond the bright colors, which filled his pupils like overtuned
color controls on a TV set. Then Vorstel was saying good night, punching Stone in the arm so hard that it would hurt him for
two days.

Stone found himself led down the second-floor hallway to one of a number of rooms that lined both sides. Two Strathers underlings
threw him down onto the plush bed inside, turned out the lantern, and left, nodding their heads back and forth in disgust
that this scum was being treated so good by Vorstel. But he was one of their top bosses. Not one of them would dare question
an order from the man, or from someone Vorstel considered to be a “friend.” They had all seen what the topman could do, and
it wasn’t something they liked to think about.

S
tone was asleep and in a drunken stupor by the time he hit the satin sheets of the featherbed. He slept hard through the night,
sunken deep into the bed, his face mashed into the pillow. When he awoke, it seemed like he had only been out a second, but
he had a headache the size of the Grand Canyon. Why had he drunk all that slime water last night? The sheer memory of it made
him want to puke his guts out. Stone pulled his face out of the pillow, squeezed as flat as a pancake into the mattress, with
the night’s drool covering its case. He turned over and tried to look around through the half-closed orbs that felt like someone
had been frying eggs in them.

He had a dim memory of purple rugs and drapes and, opening his eyes fully, saw that it was true. For the whole room was done
up heavy-duty, as a bordello circa 1890s New Orleans. The room was lavishly overdone with materials of velvet and satin-colored
deep purples, magentas, violets, and cherry-reds covering every wall, chair, bed, and window. A gilded mirror hung on the
ceiling straight overhead, presumably for the occupants of the bed to witness their writhings in the post-video world. Stone
got a good look at his rad-pimpled, stubbly, hung-over face, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

Suddenly he remembered Excaliber. He had left the damn dog outside, guarding the Harley last night. The realization slammed
into his already reeling skull like a sledgehammer pulverizing a piece of rock. Stone groaned and fell back down, wanting
only to slide under the satin sheets and sink into sweet oblivion. Anything could have happened. The damn dog could be dead,
the bike stolen. And it was all his fault for going into the Get Drunk and getting soused to the point of no return.

“Fuck.” He cursed at the walls, gritting his teeth. He rose, and since he hadn’t taken a thing off when he was deposited on
the bed, not even his boots, he didn’t have to put a thing on, either. Without even straightening his hair or flattening out
a single one of the hundred rumples and creases on his clothes, he tumbled out of the bordello room like a wild man from the
mountains who hadn’t yet been domesticated.

Most of the early-morning staff hadn’t arrived yet, as it was only 6:48, so the place was nearly empty downstairs but for
two old women who polished all the woodwork in the place, keeping it shining for the “gentlemen” customers. They looked at
the savage-looking Stone and shuddered, looking away, wondering silently to themselves just how bad the place had gotten if
it was taking in clients of such low repute. Perhaps they’d better start looking for jobs elsewhere. The Hot Vagina might
not be the kind of place they wished to work anymore.

Stone stumbled outside into the early-morning daylight. Just his luck, the sun was shining like it was about to nova, the
air was brilliant, the light cutting down like a sheet of shimmering aluminum foil from every pore of the crystal sky. He
had to walk along, holding his palm over his eyes, which only added to his bizarre appearance so that the few people walking
the streets of Cotopaxi veered away from the madman who was praying from his eyeballs. Stone wasn’t even quite sure where
he had left the damn bike or the damn dog. They had dragged him blocks from the bar. But at last a few things looked familiar.
Then he saw the alleyway. Taking a deep gulp and holding his breath, for Stone was truly terrified that he’d find nothing,
he walked to the alley entrance and turned, his stomach clenching up like a fist.

The dog was there. It was all right. It was standing atop the Harley and staring straight ahead at the entrance of the alleyway
like it was ready to kill any son of a bitch who even showed his face around the corner.

“Uh—uh—sorry, dog,” Stone said, sidling forward, trying to lift his shoulders apologetically but finding that the shrug made
his neck feel like a guillotine was being run through it. “Ran into some trouble, you know how it in” The pitbull didn’t say
a word in return. Not a growl or whine or snarl. Nothing, And that got Stone more worried than he had been. For he had never
seen the animal completely silent before. It stared at him with black, brooding, accusatory eyes the closer he got, giving
him looks of, How could you, you slime-sucking pea-brained moron and I’m going to kick your ass when I feel like it. And other
such canine expressions of high-level indignation.

“Look, dog—okay, I fucked up. Give me a break. You fuck up, too, sometimes. Remember how you jumped off the fucking Harley
and went after a whole pack of timber wolves? That was great. Now you conveniently forget about that.” The pitbull stared
back at Stone, not giving an inch. That was history. “Okay, okay, look, I admit I fucked up,” Stone went on, seeing the merciless,
unforgiving look in the animal’s eyes. At last it let out a little snort of contempt through its dry and hungry muzzle, which
to Stone was an encouraging sign.

“I know, I know, you didn’t eat all night, and dozens of assholes tried to come in here and steal the—” As he spoke, Stone
saw something on the filthy alley ground that showed that someone
had
in fact tried to come in. A finger, a human finger, freshly bitten off, lay at the foot of the bike, still oozing a little
rivulet of watery blood.

He grinned at the dog, which refused to return such a look but stared only harder, as if trying to burn its canine anger into
Stone’s soul. “All right, come on, Mr. Macho,” Stone said at last, seeing that he was dealing with a brick wall. He took out
the chain leash that he had used a few times on the animal, quickly snapping it around the pitbull’s collar. The animal pulled
at the thing with a whine and then bit at it with his jaws, but Stone pulled hard, full steam ahead, and the animal jumped
down from the bike and quickly followed, trotting along at his heels.

Stone led the dog back down the street, appearing even more demented than before, since he now had an equally odd-looking
creature following right behind him. If this was what they were breeding up in the mountains, thought dozens of townspeople
who were out to on their food and used-goods stores, someone should go up there and wipe the whole damn place out.

Back at the Hot Vagina, Stone walked right up to the madam, an ancient thing with so much pancake makeup and red rouge on
her face that she looked like something a child had colored in a coloring book.

“I want a steak,” Stone said. “A steak for me, and a steak for my dog here. Make that two steaks for my dog, and eggs too.
Right up, okay? And two glasses of stout or beer, but none of that green or brown stuff I had last night.”