Uschi! (27 page)

“We must hurry,” said High Priestess Stompanato. “The time is right to summon Ga’Hantor and present to him our tribute.”

“Aren’t you at all curious about that?” asked Dash. He pointed a finger down to the altar’s steps, where the bed comforter and
Watchtower
pages enshrouded Li’l Bocephus lay. During the trip out here, Denny had been forced to ride on top of him. They took Li’l Bocephus out of the El Camino’s bed and carried him here the same time as they did Denny and Uschi. “There’s a body in there, I could feel it when I picked it up.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s the body of somebody these two murdered and were bringing out here to dump in the thicket,” said Blink. “Sounds logical enough.”

“Oh, so that’s what brings y’all out here tonight to our little unique chunk of Texas, is it?” said Stompanato. The sneer coming to her lips told she possessed a wicked appetite for scandal. Her eyebrows arched, and the sudden upheaval made some of the brown spiders in the hairs hang on for dear life. “Indulging in a little body dump? Who was it you killed? A husband or a wife that was in the way? Some relative you’re hoping left you in the will or has an insurance policy that will pay out to one of you? Maybe just a random stranger you picked up for a thrill kill? How positively noir. It doesn’t really matter. Leave the body where it is. Dead or alive, Ga’Hantor shouldn’t mind. There are still precious fluids contained within the carcass he can enjoy.”

High Priestess Stompanato’s arms went up high, reaching for the stormy night sky. Intense lightning flashes ignited like gigantic strobe lights. Frisky currents of static electricity were about, passing through her black widows bush and causing her privates to snap and pop with the occasional spark between arachnids. The sensation for Stompanato was not an entirely unpleasant one. The rain was now stronger, coming down in steady sheets. The tampon string was soon soaked and pasted to her inner thigh, looking not too terribly unlike a dead, pale worm lying on a cement pavement.

While all this was happening, a curious Dash was making his way down the altar steps. “I need me a look at this dead body. I got to know how they rubbed the boy out.” He started to tear the bed comforter open as if it were the paper wrapping on an ice cream fudge bar, ripping the top off and then splitting it apart down the center.

“Summon our father,” Stompanato commanded. “Summon our god.”

The chanting and drumming ceased. One of the detergent bucket drummers put down his instrument and picked up another: a hubcap to a ’78 Ford Pinto station wagon that he began to beat with a metal cafeteria ladle as if it were a gong.

Ga’Hantor heard and answered the call. There was a distinct rumbling occurring beyond the clearing, the sounds of a something hefty being active. Everyone could see trees being bent aside as that something hefty began to make its way toward the clearing. The spider people, rain-sodden and in worshipful awe, dropped to their knees when Ga’Hantor joined them in the clearing and was fully revealed.

It was a giant tarantula; three tons of arachnid sensation huge enough to be just the right size to make hot and heavy love to a fishtailed 1953 Cadillac El Dorado. Its coat of fur was remarkably adept at repelling the rainwater—something to do with the natural oils it produced. The moisture would bead and roll off of Ga’Hantor, leaving the undercoat warm and dry. There appeared to be a light of intelligence to its obsidian, lidless eyes—all eight of them—that the more common spider did without. The chelicerae members above the mouth were twitchy and seemed anxious for action; the fangs at the end of them pointed straight down from the head and were as long as a man’s leg.

“Just what the fuck are you people doing to each other?”

That question was asked by Li’l Bocephus. He was out of the bed comforter and clear of any
Watchtower
holy pages, standing on the lower steps of the altar. His eaten on and unleashed homosexuality ass raped injuries from the previous night were all healed and faded to nothing, broken bones knitted perfectly back together and one hundred percent whole and vampire healthy and cocky with himself again. The ROY ROGERS FUCKED MY MOMMA arm tat of his right back to going strong. His ruined western shirt and blue jeans hung off of his frame in Doc Savage in the thick of an exotic pulp magazine adventure tatters. There was no seat to his jeans, burned away by the blessed power of holy magazines, so his scrawny lily-white ass was exposed and on view for anyone who cared to see it.

He flawlessly performed a one-handed opening of his can of Copenhagen and crowded his bottom lip with a pinch of snuff. Necessary to one hand the task due to his other hand currently occupied choking a pert near to death Dash, holding the spider eyes boy down kneeling at the backwoods vampire’s one bare and other wearing a snakeskin cowboy boot feet.

Li’l Bocephus’s two good eyes looked up toward Stompanato and Uschi and all the rest, the rain beating his freckled face and washing his oily red hair for the first time in three years, and he leisurely inquired, “Y’all with the circus? Because this shit seems a good deal like some of the unnatural business I would assume circus folk would willing allow themselves to be caught up in.”

The unexpected arrival of a bare-assed good ol’ boy redneck confused the hell out of High Priestess Stompanato. She put little thought behind her response and simply replied in an indignant tone, “There is no circus here. You are standing in a church and this is the middle of a religious service.”

“Whatever, I really don’t give two shits and a chili dog fart. If it floats your boat and don’t cause me any headaches, then more power to you and y’alls and call it what you want. I just need two things from y’all, then I’m outta your hair for life.”

Quick like a bullet, Li’l Bocephus was at the top of the altar and standing nose to nose with Stompanato. He brought Dash right along with, never missing a beat in throttling the butthole web spinner. With a playful as a ruptured appendix wink, he reached between Stompanato’s thighs and uncorked her vagina by plucking out the soiled tampon. Li’l Bocephus tossed the bloody sanitary napkin in his mouth and commenced chewing on it like it were a stick of gum. He savored the flavorable taste.

“One,” he resumed saying around the chewy mouthful, “I would powerfully like to see you get some industrial strength bug spray on your suffering twat and eyes. That’s got to be the nastiest state of venereal disease I’ve yet to come upon. So bad off it’s to the sorrowful point of attracting bugs. That nasty business is unquestionably to the point of being the un in unsanitary. Two, the green titty bitch and her faithful retardo companion you got gooed in Silly String are mine. All mine. We have got ourselves revenge issues. They are gonna die by my hand and my hand only. If you don’t agree to my demands, then the shit we got going on in here is gonna get awful damn toothy. You don’t want to get toothy with me, bugs lady.”

“You don’t give me goosepimples,” High Priestess Stompanato pointed out. “All you are is one dead shitkicker standing in front of me. Care to know why I’m so confident in your being dead? Turn around and face the wrath of Ga’Hantor, the one true spider god.”

A bolt of lightning, crooked as loaded dice and hotter than three feet up a bull’s ass, then slashed the night sky, and Li’l Bocephus did as the bug lady suggested. He treated himself to a look at what was going on behind him. It was a sight he could find no way possible to appreciate.

There was the giant spider the folks in these here parts called Ga’Hantor. The bug had crossed the length of the clearing and now squatted at the bottom of the sacrificial altar, reared back on its segmented hind legs and more up close and personal with Li’l Bocephus than he honestly would prefer such a critter as that to be.

Tampon was tapped out, so Li’l Bocephus spat it from his mouth. The sight of such a massive beast in such uncomfortably close proximity to himself drove him to forget about the throat in his hand, and a gasping Dash was able to slip loose and scamper away from him. “It ought,” Li’l Bocephus theorized, “to be against the laws of both God and government for a critter like that to grow so fucking awful considerable.”

“The first sacrifice of the evening is now!”

As if Stompanato’s words were the cue it waited for, Ga’Hantor then aimed its spinning tubes at the end of its abdomen and fired a cable of silk directly at Li’l Bocephus. It hit the vampire in the chest. This mass of webbing was ten times the size of what Blink and Dash could fire from their asses, splattered over the front of Li’l Bocephus like it was wet paint, and instantly bonded to him. The spider took hold of the web with its forelegs, the hooked claws at the end of the legs working as nimbly as fingers, and it began to reel its prey in.

Li’l Bocephus resisted, pulling back on the web and digging his feet in. He reacted without thinking and put his hands on the web, intending to snap it in two. That didn’t work out well. Its adhesive properties glued his hands down and compounded his trouble.

Ga’Hantor’s strength easily won out, yanking Li’l Bocephus off his feet and dragging his tumbling carcass down the rain-slicked altar steps.

Now he was prepared to go apeshit with panic. “Don’t eat me!” Li’l Bocephus screamed as he was brought in closer by the second. “Please don’t eat me! None of this shit is fair. Please no, not another monster thing roughhousing on me and spoiling my regularity. All I ever wanna do is drive around in my pickup truck and drink folks’ blood. That’s it. When the two mules fornicating in a horse trailer did that become too much to ask for? Tell me. When? Why am I being picked on all of a sudden? Is there any hope for my situation to get back to normal for my loveable blood-drinking self? Goddmanit, I said please don’t be eating on me!”

Once he was towed off the altar and flopping about in the mud and rainwater, Ga’Hantor lifted the whiny bitch Li’l Bocephus off the ground and brought him in close to its mouth.

“Hey, freaky deaky bug-boy, are you at all by any chance familiar with the term kemo sabe?”

The monstrous fangs of Ga’Hantor penetrated a flailing and crying Li’l Bocephus along his belly, a pinch below the base of the sternum. They sank in with no difficulty and penetrated obscenely deep, avoiding hitting his spinal column by mere inches. A vast quantity of venom was injected into him; it spread fast, burning through his internal workings like bleach splashed into the eyes. Immediately Li’l Bocephus fell victim to the venom’s paralyzing properties. He was turned flexible as a bathmat and stone silent.

As well as a paralysis, the tarantula venom was also acidic. Within seconds all flesh material inside Li’l Bocephus was dissolved to a smooth, watery soup that Ga’Hantor found most palatable. The spider put the unable to earn a GED vampire to its mouth and commenced to enjoy its first meal of the evening. Porn stars wish they could boast of possessing the suction power the overgrown spider employed. Li’l Bocephus was in a hiccup’s time drained empty. All that remained was a shriveled, papery husk of a thing that blew away with the wind like so much inconsequential litter.

“I hate to see that happen,” said Uschi. “I’m gonna miss that boy. He was quality good eating.”

First, Denny was compelled to congratulate himself for neither pissing nor shitting his pants. In a situation like this and for a guy like himself that was a legitimate achievement. Second, he asked Uschi around the gob of web cemented to the side of his face in a not wholeheartedly calm tone of voice, “Do you suppose now is a good time to perhaps get it in gear and start doing some begging for our lives? May not do any positives for us, but at least it’d be a cunt’s hair more proactive than doing zilch.”

“No, best thing, that’s not called for. We’re not the ones dying tonight. All these fucked up in the wrong way shitballs are the ones dying.”

And Uschi then dedicated every last Satan installed ounce of strength she possessed to the task of escaping her cocoon. She attempted movement, found it to be a tough but viable option. If she struggled long and hard enough there was some give to the sticky, stringy stuff. Uschi managed her hands in front of her and started to dig with her fingers. Soon there was enough space where she could push out with her arms. She cracked her prison open as if it were a peanut shell and started squirming, coming out of the cocoon. The sound of the webbing being forced to separate was like medieval chainmail being cut with a hacksaw. Her latex costume tore and was ripped off of her; she even lost the cute little nurse’s cap. When she finally emerged free and standing, the one-woman bust-tackular zombie massacre was nude but for cha-cha shoes and fishnet stockings and a garter belt. Her hair was a wet and silk clotted mess. In the lightning flashes, the can of tunafish on her head was as noticeable as a car’s headlight installed in a watermelon and would flash a bright sparkle. Titties bounced like they were auditioning for a starring role in a 1970s Aaron Spelling TV series.

“Now allow me to set to the task of going about murdering every last one of you positively despicable motherfuckers.”

“Subdue her,” ordered High Priestess Stompanato.

Blink acknowledged the command. He turned his back to Uschi and, hands on his knees, cocked his naked and water beaded ass in her general direction, preparing to deliver some butt web justice. The spinnerets surrounding his brown balloon knot began to move like inch worms trying to race across the scorching surface of a hot plate.

High Priestess Stompanato was the closest to Uschi. She reached out and snatched hold of her with both hands by an arm, right above the wrist. The grip she was cinched in was tighter than the iron jaws of a sprung bear trap. A chill of grave concern suddenly struck Stompanato. She couldn’t move her arm, couldn’t break loose. Stompanato’s arm wasn’t hers to do with as she wished any longer.

“I certainly would appreciate it if you and your tig ol bitties wouldn’t do anything harmful toward me. Show respect, I’m a member of the clergy.”

“I’m going,” Uschi told her, “to take this briefest of brief moments to quote the words of the sainted Mother Teresa and say to you ‘Fuck you, you fucking unlicensed ass inspector dick-faced fucker.’”