John Shirley - Wetbones

"I don't know, man, that don't -"

"Just come on, Orphy. Let's hurry and get it done. We doing all right. I watched your back, got that dog; you came in for me with that asshole, we doing okay. We got the juice on, so fuck it, let's do it."

With the flashlight doused they followed a path toward the house; it was an old brick path, the cracks between the bricks lumpy with moss; Manzanita and miniature palms and a riot of bird of paradise crowded in thickly on both sides.

About fifty yards from the darkened columns of the main house, the trees and brush were cleared for a lawn that had gone to seed; the yellowish grass was knee-high now, and clumped with thistles. The brick path skirted the lawn on this side – on the far side of the lawn was a gravel driveway, thatchy with weeds beside it, an old, stone watering trough and a plaster jockey lawn ornament. Lonny saw no cars and wondered where they kept them.

To Lonny's right was a passageway of trellis, heavily coated with rose vines and morning glory. There was a statue of a woman that had become overgrown with the rose vines. He found himself staring at it.

Then the statue moved. It was a woman. A woman stuck in the vines.

Orphy saw her first. "Jesus Christ…" Lonny followed him up to the woman and switched on the flashlight. Thinking it would show she wasn't real; was some kind of dummy.

When the light hit her she squirmed and chuckled miserably to herself. "Fuck!" Lonny breathed. She was nude except for a tattered, brown-stained bra. She looked like she'd been wedged into the vines, but some of them seemed to have grown in around her. Which was almost possible; she was so emaciated – her skin more blue-gray than pink, her skeleton pushing through – she might have been there for weeks or months, if someone was feeding her. The thorns had dug permanent pockets into her skin, which was streaked brown with old blood. When she squirmed, fresh blood runnelled down…

Lonny shone the light on her face. It wasn't Eurydice. It was some white woman, who had maybe once been blonde. Her hair was mostly gone now, and her right eye was scratched out. A shiny green-black centipede ran from the light back into its home in one of her nostrils. She shuddered and sneezed.

Orphy was cursing him. "Get the fuck away from her, man…"

Lonny lowered the light; it pooled at her crotch. One of the thicker vines ran up between her legs, wedged deeply in her crotch…

"Jesus, lady!" Lonny burst out, trying to pull a vine free from her.

"Don't!" she rasped. With that sound giving out a smell of supreme rot. "Go… way."

Orpheus took Lonny's arm. His tone humbled now as he said, "Let's go. We get her out later. Police or ambulance or something."

Lenny let Orphy pull him onto the path. "These people are fucking illin', Orphy." His voice breaking; tears burning his eyes. What he'd seen was only just beginning to sink in. "They're sick motherfuckers."

But fear gave way to repugnance when he saw, only a few steps farther on, the men on the other side of the trellis. He couldn't see much more than their silhouettes, dappled with starlight and twisty with vine-shadow. Most of them wore clothing but at least two of them were naked. All of them were men – no, there, a woman moved into view. She wore a dress but no underwear. She stood with her legs well apart, her hips thrust forward, the skirt lifted, her gray pussy caught in a patch of thin moonlight. Like the others, she was masturbating.

"Fuck!" Orphy burst out. "They're all…"

They all were. Jerking off.

Lenny shone the flashlight on them just enough to be sure that none of them were Mitch or Eurydice. The woman had her hand in a hole dug in a tall, hollow-eyed man's side; he was standing there wobbly and shaky as she worked her hand around in the wound up to the wrist…

Lenny quickly took the light off them. They whispered to Lonny. He wasn't sure if he was hearing the voices, imagining them – or if they were just coming into his mind from somewhere…

"Some of this…?" The woman asked, in a whisper.

"Hey little boys, have you ever wanted to see the roots of your own penis?" A man's voice.

" You guys like to party down, right? That's what you party animals like, huh? Party party party party party…" Another man's voice.

" Hello, hello, how are you today, taking a walk, taking a walk, come to visit, come to visit? Look at this, look at this! "

No human voice.

Lonny pointed the gun, fired convulsively through the trellis. A fully bloomed rose became a fireworks burst of petals as the bullet passed through it and someone whispered, " Good. Again! "

Orphy was dragging Lonny along, then, in a run down the path toward the house. Lonny's palpitating heart telling him, This is the wrong way, you should be running to get the fuck out of here!

But they kept going. They almost stumbled over the security guard lying half in the grass, his legs sprawled across the walkway. They made the mistake of pausing to look. There was a woman squatting over the guard's face…

There was a man playing with the guard's cock. He'd twisted wire around its base to keep blood in it, force an erection. In the darkness it was a moment before Lonny saw the other people crouching in the long grass. Waiting.

Then the dark figures were up out of the grass and coming at them. Hands outstretched. Laughing.

" Shiiiiiit! " Lonny wasn't sure if it was him or Orphy who screamed this as he fired the gun impulsively at the dark shapes. Heard a grunt and then a giggle and they kept coming and he turned to run toward the fence but there were others on the walk back there, coming after them, the illin fuckers jerking off as they came. He fired at them, too, and then the gun was empty and there was no time to reload so he sprinted toward the house, his lips drawn back in the rigidity of total fear, babbling, "Orphy come on goddamn come on and -" Gun shots behind him. ''And don't waste no bullets we gotta get over here we gotta – we gotta – we gotta -" Not sure what they had to do. And then he stumbled, going down on his hands and knees, grinding his teeth at the pain as a brick-corner smacked into his right kneecap, cursing when the flashlight glass shattered on another brick. His little totem of light snuffed out. He tossed the dead flashlight away as he heard running footsteps behind him, someone calling to him mixed up with a moron's giggles. Lonny jumped to his feet and took off again, chest heaving, thinking he should try to load the gun. But these people (the house was looming up in front of him now, dark and motionless) didn't seem to care if they were shot and oh no where was Orpheus?

As he reached the front steps he paused, panting, looked back for Orphy – and didn't see him.

A whisper in his head. " Hey kid, wait up, we wanna parrrrrtay! "

And then he heard Orpheus's voice. Yeah. For sure. It was him. How could a dude as hard as Orpheus make noises like that? Screaming piteously, from somewhere in the darkness behind the screen of rose trellises.

Culver City, Los Angeles

"When's that party you're going to?" Jeff asked, coming into his office. He seemed agitated, Prentice noticed, looking up from the word processor's display. Jeff was putting his hands in his back jeans pockets, taking them out, crossing them over his chest; the lines of his narrow face were tauter than ever.

"Tomorrow night, Jeff. What's got you so…?"

"My brother is still fucking missing man, that's what!" He chewed at his upper lip; it gave him a bulldog look.

"I talked to that fucking detective. Blume. He doesn't know shit except that kids are turning up dead. Teenagers, young women. One man so far – his body was all crushed -"

"Oh, that. Yeah, I read about it."

"- so they don't know much about him except they're pretty sure he was in his mid-twenties or so which means it wasn't Mitch."