Uschi! (28 page)

She raised a leg and planted her foot on Stompanato’s bony hip. This proved to be a sturdy spot for a brace to push off from as Uschi tore the high priestess’s arm off at the shoulder. The humerous bone wrenched free from the socket, skin and muscle and ligament and other gristly matter ripped, and a high arcing fountain of arterial blood gushed from the end of the raw stump as forcefully as an open fire hydrant spraying a street corner.

The loss of the arm drove Stompanato into a cold, numbing shock, mercifully saving her much in the way of pain. Her brain shut down and turned as sharp as a TV set without any antenna reception. She was blissfully unaware when Uschi choked up on the severed limb like a big leaguer and bludgeoned her over the head with it brutally enough the snap her neck and render her dead before the body could even hit the altar bricks.

It was every arachnid for themselves. The black widows disbanded formation around the vagina and scattered, spreading like a dark pool over the thighs and belly. The eye socket little brown guys wanted to stay where they were, but since High Priestess Stompanato’s dead body settled face up, the falling rain made quick work of flooding the sockets and washing them out of their skull homes.

Dash and Blink were dispatched in rapid tandem.

Uschi turned on Blink, leading with Stompanato’s arm, and assaulted his asshole. She rammed the long, slender female limb up inside his ass, capping the well before any silk could be spun and launched. It went in bloody stump first and not stopping until reaching all the way up to the elbow.

This was colon Armageddon for Blink. Not an easy entrance for the arm—blood had made poor lubricant on the rectal interior. The sharp and jagged break in the bone cut open the flesh and did irreversible damage to the web spinning tubes and hemorrhoids. Spinnerets crumbled like brittle pecan sandies cookies and massive internal hemorrhaging occurred. The bowels were profoundly lacerated and spilled, smothering the other ravaged viscera in waste.

Blink went down to one knee and was understandably screaming his head off in pure agony. Uschi set to work relieving the spider-human mutant of his misery by taking hold of him and turning him upside down. She lifted him up high over her head with an ankle in each of her hands and split his legs wide apart. Imagining he was a posthole shovel, Uschi unmercifully hammered the top of his cranium against the altar’s bricks and concrete. His
Greatest American Hero
honky afro was ruined. Flattened and his skull cracked open in multiple areas and granting easy passage for brains and blood to squirt from. The spiders serving as his eyes were smooshed to nasty pudding when the sockets unexpectedly collapsed under the force of the violent contact and snapped shut with the authority of a pissed snapping turtle closing its jaws. Yeah, that killed him up real fine and dandy.

Dash was still reeling from his encounter with Li’l Bocephus, clutching at his bruised and hurting like it was on fire neck and fighting to regulate his breathing. He was only vaguely aware some sort of activity was happening around him. He was totally taken by surprise when Uschi used a roundhouse scythe kick to the back of his knees to take him down.

She next anchored him to the altar by placing her feet on top of his calves. Her hands slipped under his arms and settled on a firm hold. She yanked up, and where there was only one Dash she now made two by snapping his spinal column off at the pelvic bone, tearing his lower torso open, and dividing him just below the ribcage. As the two halves of Dash died, the most amazingly colorful and interestingly arranged internal network spilled out of him.

Denny was freed from his silken bonds. There hadn’t been as much webbing applied to him as Uschi, so his impression of a butterfly leaving the cocoon wasn’t as difficult. He came out still wearing his clothing and managing to stand. The rectum concoction glued to his face was successfully peeled off. He was not feeling particularly Mark Hamill in
Corvette Summer
right then.

“We need to hit it,” he skittishly yelled to his zombie love over the commotion of the storm, “and run away from this spot as fast as we can like the cowardly motherfucker I know God has always intended for me to be.”

“Why we need to be doing that, best thing?”

The high winds made the rain drop at a near sideways angle. It cruelly beat against Denny as if it had just caught him in bed with its wife.

“That is why?” And he pointed a finger at the god of the Mapache spider people standing before the altar and curiously watching the two of them with its collection of eyes. “I am simply overcome with a powerful urge to strive to avoid being spider ate. Ain’t you?”

“Oh poo, he ain’t no bother.”

“He ain’t?!”

“Come here and give me some good luck and then watch the show.”

Uschi grabbed a rain-soaked and shaking Denny and pulled him in close. She guided his hand to her crotch and aided him in inserting two fingers inside her wetter than Seaworld sex. Then she put her mouth on his and stuck her tongue like halfway down his throat.

“Time to get my homicide on.”

“I tell you what,” said Denny, as he watched Uschi go off to battle, “if we get out of this, it’ll be a shitting gold-platted turds miracle.”

Devil zombie sex goddess charged the giant spider. Ga’Hantor, prepared to meet her attack, lunged forward with its enormous fangs leading the way. Snarling and growling like Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, Uschi grabbed hold of the fangs and twisted them counter clockwise as if she had a steer by the horns and was bulldogging it. This stopped the spider dead before it could manage to perpetrate upon her any harm. She exerted herself more and ripped the right chelicera member off the arachnid’s head. A wounded Ga’Hantor screamed in anguish a bubbling hiss that Uschi silenced after she then turned the bare-handed amputated appendage around and used the fang on the end of it as a weapon against the tarantula, spearing the nearest available eye.

While it was distracted with its misery, Uschi darted to the third leg on the right and scaled the limb as quickly and as efficiently as a monkey on a mission. Battering rain and blowing wind trying to knock her off, she scrambled over the furry cephalothorax and reached for the two top eyes. Grapefruit-sized, the two darlings fit right snug in the palms of her hands. She squeezed on them rougher than they could tolerate.
Pop! Pop!
Eye jelly oozed between her fingers.

Now we really had a rodeo going.

A terrified and agonizing Ga’Hantor, just shy of halfway blinded and its own paralyzing and corrosive venom now filling its head, began to jump and buck a terrible deal. Uschi held on to the back of the tarantula like a pro rodeo bull rider bound and determined to stay on the whole eight seconds and win her that grand prize money.

Tonight’s church services were over and done. The spider people in the clearing were now making a mad scramble into the woods to escape being crushed under a stampeding Ga’Hantor. A fair majority of them were successful, but there was the occasional unfortunate who was slashed in two by the tarantula’s clawed feet or somebody was smashed to goo when they fell under the arachnid’s descending bloated rear abdomen.

During her rambunctious ride, Uschi stomped the heel of a cha-cha shoe over and over again down against the cephalothorax, fracturing exoskeleton and sending shards flying like the shrapnel from a handgrenade. She didn’t relent until she heard it crack open with a shattering sound like a fireman’s ax chopping into a block of ice. Six-inch thick sheets of chitin were peeled back. The revealed internal spider flesh beneath was pale and spongy stuff; the blood it copiously hemorrhaged blackish and fragrant like an infected tooth.

She unhesitantly reached inside the vulnerable meat and began to rip out spider parts by the fistfuls. Uschi knew two things regarding arachnid anatomy: jack and shit. She didn’t know what the fuck she was bringing out of this thing—could be part of the heart, possibly the liver, maybe the stomach, or only large masses of inconsequential fat. The idea was to keep tearing shit out until she hit the motherlode, some vital organ critical to maintaining life, and Ga’Hantor would keel over dead.

A fine idea. Because that’s exactly what happened.

Ga’Hantor abruptly calmed its ass down and collapsed lifelessly to the ground. The large quantity of blood loss caused the carcass to shrivel up and its eight limbs to curl in under itself.

Uschi dismounted her kill and commenced strutting about the arachnid corpse like she had just won the Miss Hawaiian Tropic beauty contest. “I’m the king booby around here.”

Denny came off the altar and joined her at her side. “Congrats on your giant spider slaying, honey. Big achievement. Something to be proud over. You’re my own little illustrated by Frank Thorne and a script by Bruce Jones Red Sonja.”

“Thank you kindly for the compliment. I am proud. But fuck that third-rate Conan in a chainmail bikini Red Sonja shit. I prefer to think of myself more a Vampirella girl.”

“I don’t recall Vampirella ever killing a giant spider.”

“Oh, I’m confident Vampi did once or twice.”

“I can’t ever remember her doing so. And you’re talking to somebody who prides themselves on his knowledge of all things Warren comic magazines. Vampirella was always fucking around with haunted mansions and killer Satanic cults and a Count Dracula from her home planet of Drakulon. No bigass spiders. Maybe you’re thinking about Sheena Queen of the Jungle. I’m sure she tangled with spiders now and then.”

“Okay, best thing. All right. Whatever you say goes. This isn’t the situation to get going with an argument. I just think a Jose Gonzalez drawn Vampirella is more the ninja killing cool than any Red Sonja bullshit.”

“I will give you that, sugar cube.”

The creek about a half-mile up from their location had finally had enough of the past few days of heavy rain. It swelled beyond its banks and joined with the livestock tanks and other bodies of water in these hereabouts to form a rushing eight-foot-high wall of flash flood waters that flowed over the saturated lands of the Mapache Thicket. Uschi and Denny turned their heads and saw it bearing down on the clearing and them, roaring louder than an F-5 tornado and uprooting trees and utility poles and fence posts in its way like a swarm of bulldozers making space for a new strip mall.

“Now, best thing, we need to do it to it.” She picked her boyfriend up in her arms and tossed him onto the backside of the dead Ga’Hantor. A split-second later she joined him on the bug. “Don’t worry; I’ve got myself confidently believing that a dead insect, no matter its colossal proportions, will always float in water. Just pucker your asshole, hang on tight to me, and pray like a first-class cocksucker to Satan this all works out hunky-dory for us.” And here Uschi found the will to smile a big and sunshiny bright one from ear to ear at Denny. “Again, don’t worry your pretty head none. I’m on top of this diaherra sandwich like Vampirella on a giant spider killing.”

The water poured over the clearing and consumed Denny’s El Camino and all other objects. The brick altar built by Ga’Hantor’s spider children was smashed to total ruin. It next slammed against Ga’Hantor and roughly scooped the bug off the ground and swept it and its two riders away on a forceful current. They rose and fell on wave swells and barreled over trees and tore through a cow pasture fence, where it acquired barbed wire tangles in its fur and all through its eight legs.

The homemade zombie girlfriend and her beau were spun and tossed on the churning waters like filthy clothing inside of a washing machine put on its highest setting. They fought like hell to remain atop the buoyant giant spider as they were carried out over roads and flat pastureland and farther into the thicket. Trash and a diverse variety of drowned animal bodies floated past them on their journey. Uschi and Denny never let go of one another, never stopped fighting to keep surviving.

A radio tower defying the flood’s wrath and remaining upright and firmly secured to the ground came into sight. The red aircraft warning lights mounted on it were flashing. Before he had time to figure out what she was up to, Uschi slung Denny over one of her shoulders and dived into the water. She swam with superhuman strokes toward the tower, Denny riding her back the whole trip. When they reached their destination, Uschi continued to carry Denny as she climbed the metal lattice. She wasn’t comfortable with stopping until they were at least double digits in feet above the water.

Their last view of Ga’Hantor was in a lightning flash, when the spider crested upon the top of a huge wave, rolling over to expose its underbelly and lifting out of the water its twisted and barbed wire hog-tied legs, then it was over the wave and gone from sight.

Denny and Uschi stayed perched on the radio tower for the remainder of the night.

Chapter Twenty

T
hey came down from the tower shortly after sunrise. Both Denny and Uschi’s every footstep on a ground that could absorb not a drop more of water was squishy like a sponge being wrung out. The storm had faded hours earlier and the floodwaters now finally receded. The weather for today was a beautiful clear blue sky and a bright summertime sun already running hot. A dense humidity made things steamy as a randy dog’s balls. The fecund odor in the flood’s aftermath was all coming from massive quantities of turned earth, dirty pools quickly turning stagnant, multiple dead carcasses spread about in every direction you bothered to look, and plenty of rotting vegetation.

Birds were having a good time. The feathered bastards were blanketing the ground and pecking away at the smorgasbord of worms and burrowing insects driven to the surface. The carrion eaters were happy to make gluttons of themselves with all the deceased they could eat. All their squawking and chirping was as loud as rush hour downtown Dallas traffic.

Denny was sore, stiff and all kinds of worn out. His eyes were red and stinging from all the silt they gathered during last night’s swim and his skin was lathered in a gritty, nasty funk. The
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
T-shirt was sticking to him like it was coated in an industrial strength glue and sodden blue jeans were hanging low enough on him to give a plumber’s ass crack showcase extravaganza in the back. His hair was as wild and as unruly as a cougar with a wasp sting on the end of its dick.