Night comes to the world tomorrow; ten thousand tomorrows from now.

The nearing sun burns low on the hazed lavender horizon of Lost Angels and the cloying, too sweet mist, gliding in from a strewn and silent world brings the souls of billions dead. Enormous lawns of corpses, in holes six feet deep, gutter in unknown miles underfoot, where they spread their thin energies and webs, blotting out the roots of the brush and trees and perpetually leaking, gleaming with hungering moisture, slime, rot. Waiting to live again. Somehow. Through hatred or fear or vengeance. Through feeding on the living. Immortality by slaughter. That was the way of LA now. Kill or be killed. Eat and be eaten. The jungle was wild in the streets at last.

Roving, nomadic gangs, like scuttering gray moss spiders, and scarlet-drenched hunter/murderers and other parasitic psychotics sprout up like deadly rings of poisoned mushrooms around the ruins. The monsters are heavily armed. Far below them, rat-like mobs, with sudden eruptions of color; bleeding red blossoms of spontaneous cannibalism, or the neon sickly green of strangling in deadly gas; here and there the streaming blue of muscle and old flesh, a snaky vine which shrinks back from the morning sun. Underfoot, there, in cemetery and tomb, in shallow unknown grave, in that vast, oversized gray-green world of the dead, is an alien place that does not welcome life.

Run Kruge unbuckled his belt, slid his protective pants down and runs his rough bare hands over the stiff muscles of his thighs. Night falls quickly in the old center of the City. It is already quite dark and the mist gathering. He glares hard at the wavering shadows then tugs up his pants sharply. His eyes flicker over the blindfolded figures, each tethered like a prize horse or slave, with soft dark leather collars, a torn cloak for some, others soaked and dripping in the misting night. His partner, Olulu, waves from the rear of the line and then, very quickly, in a blink, his head explodes.

The huge woman standing behind Run Kruge turned him around with a painful grip. "We don't mate with his kind. But you'll do." She ran a circular razor-sharp blade along his neck. "Won't you?" Her eyes swept over his body, as if vacuuming it of every sensation, every touch, every kiss. Making it blank. "Virgin" she said with a smile.

Calling into the shadows, women appear. Many of them. Naked and armored, ragged and dressed in black velvet. A coven of women not dead nor yet living. They stand around, circling Run Kruge. "We accept him," they began to chant. "We accept him!" The huge woman drapes her muscular arm across Run's shoulder. "We're going to get to fuck. I need a partner for the Erotikon. You're dead either way, so you might as well get killed by fucking, yeah?"

Fucking with the Dead isn't against the law anymore. There is no law. There is only somebody else and you. Sometimes you live. Usually not. The Dead are everywhere anyway. Run had heard the rumors about Erotikon ever since he arrived. They say people come from everywhere for the most outrageous fuck rave in the world...Los Perditos LA. The Lost Ones. All show up for Erotikon.

It was probably some Miss Universe reject who started Erotikon; leather space suits and latex cocks, erotic living statuary and live fucking on stage; the hottest music; the acid-pop and anything shock was there. That was centuries ago. Now, the survivors can free-style. Humans can't kill monsters. They have to kill themselves. The legends of Erotikon kill and slay and fuck beyond number. No one counts anymore. Not after the computers died.

The amazon women prod and strip Run with grins and laughter. Some boldly stroke his hanging penis and lick their lips. Several of the women hold him down. "A test," the huge woman says lightly, turning away. The circle of women tightens, spinning in and in until Run is lost from sight among the disrhythmic bounce and spasm of flesh. "If he doesn't pass the test, find another." Run watches the swivel of her rounded naked hips. He turns away when she lifts a bloody fragment of Ululu's head and licks it.

"The slaves!" she shouts. The women leave Run's body like birds of prey, fastening on the throats and entrails of the blindfolded slaves, killing all in a few heartbeats. The huge woman looks at Run. "Good."

"Come away from the slaughterhouse, man," she holds open the flap of a well-concealed shelter. "Come show me your fucking stick. Maybe I'll let you stay human," her laughter rains over him, like flung sweat.

She is right. Inside the shelter, the slaughterhouse is more refined. And ancient. Trophies and bones lie strewn in crumbling heaps; there a massive wolf skull, there a knot of blackened hulks in a metal cage: her lair.

"To Erotikon!" she toasts, dragging up a huge and ornate goblet, splashing red wine across her bare breasts. "Drink, human," again her laughter hisses in his ears. "It's only ...wine."

The thick syrupy alcohol flames down Run's throat; his belly is scalded. A ramrod of burning metal thrusts down him until it stiffens his cock with a plunge of heated blood. The head throbs and prickles.

"My wine," the huge woman says. "I am called Diana. It's a name. Better than a number. You are number three." Her lips smirk in caked purple lipstick. "The others." She pinches her fingers together and shrugs broad shoulders. She nods at Run's engorged prick. "That might last," she says with a laugh.

Run slurs through his chattering teeth. "S'more than wine."

"Man with a brain, are you, Three?" Her big fingers wrap around his thick shaft; she pulls him to her. "Win me this Erotikon and I will fulfill your every dream, Three. Lose it and die a million times. I'll just keep bringing you back, you know. You'll wish you were alive, Three!"

Machines fuck, automated erotic transmittals crackle, cyborg-sex hums, and the natural animal sexy roar of a rave now is beyond understanding, beyond remembering. This is Erotikon. Death and Undead here fuck and suck The Living, and the Nearly Living. All warfare is stopped save the competitions: Erotikon!

Winners are legend upon legend. Who is King and Queen Fucker in the City of Lost Angels? Who the Princesses and who the strange and whispered shapes that enter the city and leave no trace? Devil? Demons? Such words have no meaning here anymore. These are The Lost. Between their killing and dying, there is only the fuck. Bitter-sweet, deadly often; but sought beyond the gold and the blood and the glory.

Diana grabs Run's hair and smears her breasts with the oil and sweat of his face, then drags his head upward. "I am Queen Fuck, Three. Believe it!"

Diana takes him immediately. Her sobs echo out of some hidden Trojan widow in her; her screams, jackal-like and haunting, are laughter and hysteria. The writhe of her on him makes Run's skin feel like a raw wound soaked in gasoline. Waiting for himself to ignite and turn to ash, Run caresses Dianaâs muscular breasts, her squeezing thighs...feels himself in a vortex. Feels the fuck happening.

Spreading her lips, the cockhead takes their opening kiss with the whisper of mingled breathing. The swollen upper curve of his knob rasps against her orchid-bud clitoris and she shivers over his straining muscles. Irretrievably, his cock slides in deeper. Diana arches, grips him from balls to tip of cock, and envelopes him in her larger body. On hands and knees, she bucks into his thrusts, growling and grunting like a boar or a lanced deer; a snared bird, fluttering: something ancient and dead taking its prey to hell.

In the City of Lost Angels, everything is Fallen. Souls are bartered for a handful of nothing; a fuck is a reprieve. Or an event. Erotikon is coming.

END

copyright © 1999 W. S. Dean (wsdean@earthlink.net)