"You got it?" Sanchez asks after a long drag on his Marlboro.
His name's an affectation: he's lily white. He's Mom's sweet boy, cleans his room, does his own laundry, kisses her goodbye, sells joints and pills to highschoolers on Saturday night, then goes to Church on Sunday pretending to be sinless as starched white sheets.
Typical American shyster.
Sanchez is young, maybe late teens, more likely early twenties. Buzz-cut hair like a Marine's, though he doesn't have that mechanized killer look. Well-formed: broad shoulders, trim waist. Sleek like a powerful colt. Biceps, designed by steroids, inked with strange runes. Plaid boxers crowning sagging jeans.
Coral pink lips.
Those lips hypnotize Snake.
Wanna feel those on my shaft.
But Snake buries the thought. This is business. Business for the Disciples.
He drawls, "I got it." Reaching down into his Varadero's saddlebag, Snake pulls out two ounces of weed, packed in a mason jar wrapped in a brown paper bag.
Towering thunderclouds glower down on the graveled lot, tucked deep inside Umstead Park. Dark green pines bend under the heavy humid air. It feels like one of those ancient days when sorcerers gargled demonic syllables and called forth entities from blasphemous planes.
Sanchez extracts the jar from the bag, opens it, sniffs. He looks up. "Good shit." He grins like a kid who's just unwrapped his best birthday wish.
Snake spits. "Disciples always got good shit, man."
Sanchez snorts. "Disciples! Disciples! You sound like Baptists. Who's your god?" There's an unexpected scalpel-like urgency to his question.
Don't tell him.
That voice doesn't come to him everyday, but Snake knows it well. He's made love to its maker countless times. The words rumble like the Pacific Plate grinding against the North American Plate.
It's the Leather Messiah's voice, and the only way you can hear it is if you take one of the Messiah's phalli up your butt.
If you've chosen Him, you obey the Leather Messiah. If you're wise.
Yeah, the Disciples of the Leather Messiah. The biker gang. You've heard of them.
America's Most Wanted
runs their photos most every Saturday. And a warning never to approach them unarmed.
The Disciples blew up that bank ... you remember the stockbroker in the black face, his staring eyes, unbelieving that anyone could strike him.
Me? Why? It was profit, just money, that's all I wanted...I've got a family...
Whiny fucker.
The Disciples are the ones who spiked the water in Branson, Missouri with good old LSD, triggered that geriatric orgy that scandalized Oprah and resulted in all those funny faces on the
CBS Evening News.
And the revolting clips on YouTube, before they were banned and shifted to Xtube.
The Disciples torched that GM dealership too. Even left their calling card: ropes and ropes of dried jism, criss-crossing on warped asphalt. Enough DNA to convict everyone of them.
You gotta be proud--hell, fucking arrogant--to be a Disciple. The Leather Messiah doesn't intend for the meek to inherit the Earth.
Snake looks at Sanchez with less lust, more wariness. "That would be telling."
Sanchez snorts.
"You gonna pay me or do I need this?" Snake clutches the pocket of his low-riding shorts, outlining a chunky Colt .45. His shorts drag down, revealing the upper limit of a patch of blond pubic hair. His body energizes as if on the cusp of murder, or sex.
"Hold it." Sanchez tosses the weed to Snake, leans into his car--Dodge Viper, because Sanchez is stylish--opens the glove box.
Snake's mouth waters. Nice butt. Awesome butt. Fuckable butt. Snake's a top, you see, and he appreciates all comely males.
Sanchez thrusts a bundle of Andrew Jacksons to Snake. His eyes linger on the outline of Snake's gun. Snake tosses the weed back to Sanchez and stuffs the money into a free pocket.
"Whatcha got there?" Snake asks.
Sanchez starts. "What?"
"Looks like a sword." The hilt sticks up like a hard slender black cock. The scabbard is decorated strangely--silver medallions bearing a design Snake can't quite make out. The weapon is set on the Viper's passenger side floor, leaning against the seat.
Sanchez swallows, glances back at the car, glances at Snake, glances at the picnic tables empty of innocents at play. "Dude owed me some money for some roxies. Traded me that instead. His granddad got it on Okinawa. World War II. You know, like on the Hitler Channel."
He lies, beloved. He wants to kill us.
A brief moment. Snake nods. "Cool."
I want you to get that sword from him. And then I want you to kill him with it.
"Now?"
Sanchez frowns, puzzled. "Now what?"
Shut up. Not now. Wait. You're pretty. But stupid.
Recovering quickly, Snake says, "We done?"
"Ahhh ... " Sanchez shifts his feet. "Might need some more. Different stuff. I've heard things ... can you get it?"
Wariness maximizes.
Different stuff? Different stuff? Is he talking about--
Snake plays dumb. "Weed? Sure." He grins. "I'm a fuckin' Disciple, man. We can get anything."
"Ummm...where?"
"Where what?"
"Where do you get it from?"
"You a narc?"
"Hell no!"
"You talk like a narc." Snake eases the Colt's butt out of his pocket. His eyes regard Sanchez the same way a python savors a vision of fresh young doe.
"Calm down, man, calm down,
calm down,
just put the fucking gun back in your pocket, OK?"
I want you to leave. He needs a mystery to solve.
"Sure, man. Sure." Snake turns and throws a leg over the saddle of his Varadero. His shorts ride lower, revealing a smooth expanse of hard buttock. He guns the engine. "Later. Cocksucker." He throws a mock salute and roars up the gravel road towards Highway 70.
He's going to follow you.
"You want me to loose him?" The wind whips Snake's long blond hair. His Van Dyke feels itchy, as if a thousand little bugs are crawling around his lips. Sweat blooms on his naked chest. The reptiles tattooed on his arm swell as he twists the throttle.
No. Go home. Let's fuck.
A boner awakens in Snake's sweaty crotch.
Grinning, he flies down the highway, past the strip malls, past the chain restaurants, under the Beltway bridge, then roars down Glenwood Avenue towards Raleigh's heart, where two semi-skyscrapers jut like half-hard cocks above the oaks and the asphalt.
Home is a rundown house buried under old oaks. Property of the Disciples of the Leather Messiah, who've taken lessons from the bankers and the lawyers and the other criminal classes and gone into real estate. It's not impressive. Warped boards in the front porch. Peeling white paint. Driveway of cracked concrete. Open windows with Venetian blinds. Mailbox stuffed full of junk. Out of season azaleas huddling against the foundations. Scratched front door. Small garage with grimy windows.
But it's private, and safe, and the cops don't stop by because the Disciples slip fresh, crisp bills into sweaty yet eager palms.
It's empty today. Other Disciples crash here, but today they're out. The Leather Messiah spins a web, and none of His Disciples know what His final design is. The Disciples obey the Leather Messiah.
Snake waits, recumbent on the tattered couch, a fat blunt smoldering between his fingers. A mass of golden hair ensnares his shoulders. On his shoulder is a tattoo of unspeakable evil: tentacles and cocks writing in unwholesome bliss.
He's stripped naked. His fat boner leans over his hard stomach, dripping liquid like molten diamonds. His nuts are ripe plums, eager to burst.
He waits, eyes bloodshot and dreamy. The heavy air, like held breath. The heat of a North Carolina summer. Thunder booms like the cannons of the gods at war.
Alone, except for television's comedy of fear.
An announcer pauses, wipes slavering lips, plunges on. There's been an outrage, a travesty, a disaster. Some insane country held elections--but America's candidate was resoundingly defeated. How can this be? Electoral fraud, must be; no one could have any genuine objections to the American way of life. Poor benighted third-worlders, wallowing in their ignorance. Who will bring them shopping malls? Democracy? Doritos? Diabetes? Analysts debate strategy. The crucial question: shall we correct the electoral returns through starvation, by conventional bombing, or a traditional nuking?
Snake laughs uproariously. Demons rule this world. It's just a matter of finding one most in accord with your personal tastes.
He hawks a huge wad of spit, languorously masturbates. He's got a gutsplitter of a prong. Thick and long, with a fat urethra capable of vomiting cup after cup of hot biker semen. Apple-sized cockhead. Urethra thick as your finger. Veins web the shaft.
Do you like him?
Snake starts, relaxes, takes a long drag, holds it, soars higher and higher, a dizzy eagle reaching for the unobtainable sun. "Hot fucker. I'd like to plow him."
Good. Maybe I'll let you fuck him later.
A pause.
Do you love me?
The golden afternoon thrusts between the slats of the blinds, Apollo's fingers caressing his lithe form, reaching for his fat cock.
"You fuck like a god," Snake says. "But I don't think I love you. How could I love someone like you? You're not human."
I am the Leather Messiah. Is that not enough?
"Love ain't nothing but a good hot fuck."
A chuckle like boulders falling in a cavern.
Let me teach you what love is, then.
A sound burbles like slow boiling wax from the old furnace grate.
A frisson of excitement shivers up Snake's cock. Heart beating fast, he stubs out the blunt, props himself up on his elbow to look.
Enter the Leather Messiah.
A mound of flesh lifts itself through the grate. It resembles, if you the uninitiated could bear to look at it, an octopus: bruise-colored flesh spotted with mushroom-colored circular blotches. The flesh is liquid and seemingly sentient, flowing smoothly around the grate bars as if the Leather Messiah is a colony of independent, sapient cells.
It shapes itself into a stump of slimy flesh, quivering. Pseudopods rise from the mass and form eyes. Roots ooze across the floor. Cilia rise like cat's whiskers.
